I think GP is talking about the ability of an AI to make decisions with reference to context from the past and therefore have a “will extended over time”
presumably still O(n2) in theory, but not for practical cases.
I think that anything reolacing attention will suffer quadratic growth for some pathological examples.
maybe if we have a better understanding of the data we could give a better definition (much like graph complexity is usually given in the actual number of edges, which are theoretically O(n2).)
The real breakthrough is that Hyena apparently has an unlimited context window.