# RWKV

6 Hacker News commenters recommended RWKV and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** An open recurrent language model that uses recurrent blocks instead of attention, reaching near-Transformer performance at small scale with well-documented research.

## Why people recommend it

- Recurrent design, close to Transformers (1 comments): "RWKV and Mamba families LLM-s have recurrent blocks instead of attention, and they get really close to performance of Transformer on small scale." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46872501))
- Excellent research and diagrams (1 comments): "they've done an excellent job with the accompanying research, provide plenty of reference diagrams and visualization" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47400001))
- Handles state-tracking that attention cannot (1 comments): "It solves state-tracking problems that fixed-depth attention provably cannot." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125545))

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## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "RWKV", https://hackerapproved.com/p/rwkv/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).