Audio Version Your browser does not support the audio element. Play/download concise audio version Download full deep-dive audio 1. Introduction: From Rio to the Future of Efficiency The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026) in Rio de Janeiro has solidified a paradigm shift that many of us in the AI architecture space have long anticipated: the transition from “approximate” efficiency to “exact” sub-quadratic modeling. For years, the industry accepted the quadratic compute and linear memory bottlenecks of standard Transformers as an unavoidable tax on quality. Rio 2026 has definitively challenged this notion. S4 S5 ...









