Diego Bachman of Manifest AI discusses the timeline and community adoption trajectory for scaling the Power Retention architecture to large foundation models.
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.”
Assertion Open · timeframe Sep 2028
Bachman: StarCoder-3B converted to Power Retention matches baseline loss in two hours
“After just 10,000 steps of training, which this training one took about two hours, this orange curve, you see that it fully matches the original loss.”
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…”