This paper “were RNNs all we needed?” explores this hypothesis a bit, finding that some pre-transformer sequence models can match transformers when trained at a

This paper “were RNNs all we needed?” explores this hypothesis a bit, finding that some pre-transformer sequence models can match transformers when trained at appropriate scale. Though they did have to make some modifications to unlock more parallelism https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01201 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01201