What-if certainty 2/5 debate potential 4/5

Parakhin: Liquid AI could beat frontier models with equal compute

Mikhail Parakhin · AI-Native Engineering: 100% adoption, 5x search throughput, unlimited tokens — Mikhail Parakhin · Apr 22, 2026 · at 1:06:01

Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin discusses whether Liquid AI's novel architecture could scale to beat frontier labs like OpenAI or Anthropic given equal capital and compute.

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“I think if they if they had similar level of compute, they would be very competitive and maybe even beat the largest models, at least from what I've seen.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Mikhail Parakhin

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Parakhin: Top AI models write code with fewer bugs than average humans
“I would claim by now, good model writes code on average with fewer bugs than average human.”
Mikhail Parakhin Apr 22, 2026 ▶ 12:19 AI-Native Engineering: 100% adoption, 5x search throughput, unlimited tokens — Mikhail Parakhin
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Parakhin: CLI AI tools outpace IDEs like Cursor at Shopify
“The other thing I would claim you could see is that CLI-based tools and tools that don't require you to look at the code becoming more popular, and you could see, yeah, various versions of Cloud Code and Codex and Pi and internal development tools taking off e…”
Mikhail Parakhin Apr 22, 2026 ▶ 5:57 AI-Native Engineering: 100% adoption, 5x search throughput, unlimited tokens — Mikhail Parakhin
Insight
Parakhin: Effective PR review requires largest pro-level models, not fast tools
“At PR review time, you want to run the largest models. That means codex or cloud code is not going to cut it. You need to have pro-level models if you really want to stem the tide of bugs from going into production”
Mikhail Parakhin Apr 22, 2026 ▶ 13:50 AI-Native Engineering: 100% adoption, 5x search throughput, unlimited tokens — Mikhail Parakhin
Insight
Parakhin: Slower AI PR reviews actually save total deployment time
“It actually, in terms of the overall time to deploy, it's total time savings if you spend more time on a longer model, like, thinking for an hour, because then you don't have to spend all that time During testing and rolling, you know, rolling back the deploym…”
Mikhail Parakhin Apr 22, 2026 ▶ 15:51 AI-Native Engineering: 100% adoption, 5x search throughput, unlimited tokens — Mikhail Parakhin
Disclosure
Parakhin: Liquid is the only genuinely competitive non-transformer architecture Shopify found
“That's why we at Shopify, when we tried multiple, and we constantly try multiple models, multiple companies, we found that for small, particularly with low latency applications, when you have low latency and or if you need longer context lengths, Liquid was th…”
Mikhail Parakhin Apr 22, 2026 ▶ 58:58 AI-Native Engineering: 100% adoption, 5x search throughput, unlimited tokens — Mikhail Parakhin
Opinion
Parakhin: Liquid-transformer hybrids are probably the best neural network architecture available
“I think especially in their hybrid form, when combined with Transformer, like in Mamba fashion, they probably the best architecture I'm aware of, like, period.”
Mikhail Parakhin Apr 22, 2026 ▶ 1:05:41 AI-Native Engineering: 100% adoption, 5x search throughput, unlimited tokens — Mikhail Parakhin
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