Bamba: An open-source LLM that crosses a transformer with an SSM

https://research.ibm.com/blog/bamba-ssm-transformer-model

92•shallow-mind•4h ago

Comments

mh-•3h ago

SSM = state-space model, for the unfamiliar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-space_representation

samanator•3h ago

Yummy

antirez•3h ago

Dear IBM name pickers: "Bamba", in Italian, means cocaine.

rzzzt•3h ago

Para bailar La Bamba / Se necesita una poca de gracia

amitport•3h ago

Maybe?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamba_(snack)

;)

akovaski•3h ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Bamba_(song)

dantastic•2h ago

Or (where I'm from) a school cafeteria:

https://www.thelocal.se/20221125/swedish-word-of-the-day-bam...

ofrzeta•2h ago

Spot on. From the linked blog post "The refrain of La Bamba, the Mexican folk song that Ritchie Valens made famous, goes: Para bailar La Bamba/Se necesita una poca de Gracia. "

francasso•3h ago

SSMs never stop

alex7o•2h ago

It's just a mamba (https://github.com/state-spaces/mamba) but with a transformer. Idk where the B comes from.

iddan•2h ago

And in Heberw it's the name of a snack made of peanut-butter-flavored puffed maize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamba_(snack)

bonzini•1h ago

As an Italian who has tried (only) the Israeli Bamba, I can certify that it is pretty addictive.

kridsdale1•1h ago

I imported these to America to feed my infant. Data shows the prevalence of peanut allergies lines up with when AAP guidelines started recommending that babies do NOT eat peanut. Israel never went along with this and thus has the lowest rates of allergies in the world.

arijun•1h ago

I think the difference in allergy rates between UK and Israeli Ashkenazi Jews (10x higher in UK Jews!) [1] is strong evidence for that.

Also, they sell Bamba at Trader Joe’s now.

[1] https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(08)01698-9/ful...

cycomanic•24m ago

Latest research does strongly suggest that introducing small amounts of common allergens (peanuts, shellfish,milk products...) as early as possible does significantly reduce risk for allergies later. Many early childhood organisations already recommend this. Official health recommendations are often slow to catch up (often for good reasons, but introducing peanuts etc. early is already officially recommended in quite a few countries (Australia, NZ, Sweden for example AFAIK). Not all health professionals are always up to date either though.

beanjuiceII•1h ago

i mean that sounds good to me

rdtsc•52m ago

So someone can get fired for picking IBM after all! Or get a bonus, depending on the organization...

vienzo•44m ago

And in Lithuanian it's a navel

_davide_•8m ago

When I read the title 'IBM crossed a transformer with an SSM and got ‘Bamba’' I laughed so hard I woke up my kid

joshjob42•2h ago

For some reason this link isn't loading, but it's on https://archive.ph/Ks0xt

jmward01•2h ago

This type of architecture is definitely the future. Unlimited attn is a dead end. As a human you don't need to scan an entire book just to guess what the next word will be and LLMs shouldn't need that either.

quantadev•1h ago

Not be contrarian, but if the next word prediction happens to be someone's name or a place or something discussed multiple places in the book then often, yes, a knowledge of the full plot of the book is "required" just to predict the next word, as you get to the middle or end of a book.

For example you could never fill in the last chapter of any good book without having knowledge of every previous chapter. Not highly detailed knowledge, but still knowledge.

aantix•1h ago

Where's the code?

beklein•28m ago

I could find these two resources: Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/collections/ibm-ai-platform/bamba-674... GitHub: https://github.com/foundation-model-stack/bamba

jwilber•1h ago

LLM/state space models have been popular for some years now, see: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.14052

More recently, hybrid architectures that utilize attention plus other operators are gaining traction.

See https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01868

adt•1h ago

https://lifearchitect.ai/models-table/

Love those GPQA scores hovering around 5% when chance (on 4-way multi-choice) would have got them 25%!

gryfft•16m ago

A stopped clock is right twice a day, but a running clock set to the wrong time is always wrong.

mentalgear•26m ago

> chose to make just about everything associated with Bamba open-source — the training recipes, the data, the data loader IBM designed for largescale distributed training, and a quantization framework aimed at shaving storage and inferencing costs.

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