Hybrid models interleave state-space model (SSM) layers with a few attention layers. NVIDIA Nemotron 3, Qwen3.5 through Qwen3.8, Kimi-K3, and GLM-5.3-Flash are…
Hybrid models interleave state-space model (SSM) layers with a few attention layers. NVIDIA Nemotron 3, Qwen3.5 through Qwen3.8, Kimi-K3, and GLM-5.3-Flash are all built this way, with Mamba-2, Gated DeltaNet (GDN), or Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) as the SSM layer. SSM layers are designed to make decoding fast: they use a fixed-size state in place of a key-value (KV) cache that grows with…