Dean: Scaling quadratic attention cannot reach billion- or trillion-token context windows
Jeff Dean · The AI Frontier: from Gemini 3 Deep Think distilling to Flash — Jeff Dean · Feb 12, 2026 · at 15:24
Jeff Dean, Chief AI Scientist at Google, explains why achieving internet-scale or multi-trillion token attention requires algorithmic and system innovations beyond naive quadratic scaling.
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“But that's not going to be solved by purely scaling the existing solutions, which are quadratic. So a million tokens kind of pushes what you can do. You're not going to do that to a trillion tokens, let alone, you know, a billion tokens, let alone a trillion.”
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