I've been noticing the same pattern lately. Whenever attention mechanisms arise, the answer is almost automatic: use Grouped Query Attention.

And honestly, I get why. GQA works. It’s efficient. It scales well. Most modern models rely on it.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always the right choice.

Depending on what you’re building, long context, tight latency budgets, or just experimenting, other designs like

✅ multi-head

✅ multi-query

✅ Latent attention

can make more sense.

That’s what pushed me to make a video breaking down how to think about choosing an attention mechanism

🎥 https://youtu.be/HCa6Pp9EUiI

and then go one level deeper by coding self-attention from scratch

🎥 https://youtu.be/EXnvO86m1W8

Image ref: @Hugging Face