The Long-Context Problem
MoE scales a model's parameters cheaply. But there's a second scaling axis that matters just as much for modern LLMs: context length — how much text the model can attend to at once. Attention's cost grows with the square of the sequence, and the memory to run it grows linearly and relentlessly, which is why long context was hard and why so much architectural ingenuity has gone into it.
MoE scales a model's parameters cheaply, but there's a second axis that matters just as much: context length. Attention's compute grows with the square of the sequence, and the KV-cache memory grows linearly and relentlessly — two distinct costs, often confused, that make long context hard. Understanding both is the setup for the efficiency techniques that solved them.