Understanding Large Language Models Series

Quadratic Complexity Explained: Why LLMs Slow Down

by Nat Currier 7 min read
AILarge Language ModelsPerformance
SERIES

Understanding Large Language Models

Part 13 of 42
Previous Understanding Overfitting in LLMs: What It Is and How to Address It
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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.

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

SERIES

Understanding Large Language Models

Part 13 of 42
Previous Understanding Overfitting in LLMs: What It Is and How to Address It
Next Multimodality in LLMs: Bridging Text, Images, and Beyond

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