Quadratic Complexity Explained: Why LLMs Slow Down

Excerpt

Understand the computational challenge that makes large language models struggle with longer inputs, and learn about the innovative solutions being developed to overcome this limitation.

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Cite This

Nat Currier. "Quadratic Complexity Explained: Why LLMs Slow Down." nat.io, 2025-01-11. https://nat.io/blog/quadratic-complexity-llms

LLMs' self-attention has quadratic complexity, causing computation and memory use to grow with the square of input length. This slows processing, limits input size, and raises costs; solutions include sparse and linea...

https://nat.io/blog/quadratic-complexity-llms

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Key stat: 7 minute read

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