Beyond Standard LLMs: Linear Attention Hybrids, Text Diffusion, Code World Models, and Small Recursive Transformers
The article by Sebastian Raschka explores alternatives to standard autoregressive transformer LLMs, including linear attention hybrids (e.g., MiniMax-M1, Qwen3-Next, DeepSeek V3.2, Kimi Linear), text diffusion models, code world models, and small recursive transformers. It discusses the revival of linear attention mechanisms and challenges, such as MiniMax reverting to standard attention in its M2 model due to poor performance on reasoning tasks.
Moonshot AI
MiniMax
Alibaba/Qwen
DeepSeek
Google/DeepMind
Mistral
Meta
Hugging Face
Allen Institute for AI
xAI
OpenAI
IBM
NVIDIA



