{"type":"post","id":"you-could-have-invented-transformers-from-memory-3ceb3c","slug":"you-could-have-invented-transformers-from-memory-3ceb3c","title":"You could have invented transformers from memory","description":"Alex Wang’s essay recasts linear maps, MLPs and self-attention as associative memory stores and estimates how many key-value associations each can hold under a stated interference measure.","retrieval_nugget":"Alex Wang’s essay recasts linear maps, MLPs and self-attention as associative memory stores and estimates how many key-value associations each can hold under a stated interference measure. The comparison gives builders a useful lens on why attention retrieves from context differently from information compressed into trained weights, but it is analysis rather than a new model or implementation recipe.","published_at":"2026-11-04","updated_at":"2026-11-07","record_date":"2026-11-04","date_kind":"published_at","topics":["memory"],"entities":["Alex Wang","Transformer"],"related_patterns":[],"novelty_label":"same_event","prior_refs":[],"source_url":"https://alexwang.ai/posts/associative-memory","source_urls":["https://alexwang.ai/posts/associative-memory"],"schema_version":"newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2","stable_id":"post:you-could-have-invented-transformers-from-memory-3ceb3c","status":"published","visuals":[],"editor":{"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]},"routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/you-could-have-invented-transformers-from-memory-3ceb3c/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/you-could-have-invented-transformers-from-memory-3ceb3c.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/you-could-have-invented-transformers-from-memory-3ceb3c.json"},"markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/you-could-have-invented-transformers-from-memory-3ceb3c.md","next_reads":[{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/memory/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/memory/","title":"Memory","reason":"Explore the memory topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/memory.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/memory.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/posts/","url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/","title":"Field Notes","reason":"Open the latest editorial analysis.","media_type":"text/html","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/sources/","url":"https://newruntime.com/sources/","title":"Sources","reason":"See the original sources this archive cites.","media_type":"text/html"}]}