SAMBA, An AI Miracle

The First Real Alternative to Standard Transformers?

Ignacio de Gregorio
10 min readJun 27, 2024
Generated by author using GPT-4o

Recently, Microsoft’s AI game can be summarized in one way: Small Language Models, or SLMs. In other words, they are obsessed with building powerful AI models that are also cheap to run.

Now, they have announced SAMBA, And let me tell you, based on its bold promises, this one is hard to believe, almost like a miracle.

They seem to have found the perfect hybrid architecture, smarter and faster than all models of its size and, importantly, defeating one of frontier AI’s biggest issues to date: extrapolation.

Fascinatingly, with Samba, you aren’t only immersing yourself in an exciting new architecture, but also gaining a deep intuition about how frontier AI models work.

You are probably sick of AI newsletters talking about how this or that **just** happened. These newsletters abound because coarsely talking about events and things that already took place is easy, but the value provided is limited, and the hype exaggerated.

However, newsletters talking about what will happen are a rare sight. If you’re into easy-to-understand insights looking into the future of AI before anyone else does, TheTechOasis newsletter might be perfect for you.

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Ignacio de Gregorio

I break down frontier AI systems in easy-to-understand language for you. Sign up to my newsletter here: https://thetechoasis.beehiiv.com/subscribe