Diego Bachman of Manifest AI shares training curves showing how model metamorphosis converts a standard transformer to Power Retention.
Assertion Contradicted
Bachman: Models claiming 256k+ context use windowed transformers, discarding data
“Anybody who says they're using a transformer
With a context length of, you know, 256,000 or more, they're not using a true transformer.
What they're using is a windowed transformer that essentially throws out a huge amount of its information at various layers …”
Assertion Open · timeframe Sep 2026
Bachman: Power Retention Delivers 100x Inference Speedup at 64k Context
“And at 64 K tokens, We get something like a 10 X speed up at training, but at inference time, because you're not only saving flops at inference time, but also paging in and out of memory of the KV cache, you actually get a hundred X speed ups from power retent…”
Assertion Open · timeframe Sep 2028
Bachman: Power Retention models match original base model performance
“They'll come out with a nice shiny new, a power retention architecture that has the same performance on whatever data set they want as the original base model did.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Sep 2026
Bachman: Big Foundation Models Will Train on Power Retention Within a Year
“After that, I think, you know, probably within six months to a year, we're going to start to see the really big foundation models being trained in this way.”
Insight
Bachman: Compute-optimal models on internet text don't need long context
“In general, most internet text has mostly short-term structure. There's just not that much value in capturing long-term structure, and so compute optimal models on internet text actually don't have that long context, and so, of course, you're perfectly fine us…”
Disclosure
Bachman: Manifest AI is releasing Power Retention architecture with fixed-size memory
“Power retention is the specific variant that we're about to release.
And it basically works by instead of the memory constantly growing, this constantly
Growing KVCache.
You have a memory that is a fixed size and each new token simply gets compressed into this…”