Yi Tay: Independent research taste is a stronger hiring signal than execution
Yi Tay · Captaining IMO Gold, Deep Think, On-Policy RL, Feeling the AGI in Singapore — Yi Tay · Jan 23, 2026 · at 1:27:50
Google DeepMind's Yi Tay discusses how frontier AI labs evaluate graduate students and job candidates who independently discover relevant research problems.
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“If somebody comes up with something and then does something that you feel that is very tasteful and it aligns with what Like researchers in the labs, like one, and they come up with that independently, you know that the function that is good, right? Like if you just go and tell somebody to do this, like you can, you just get the signal that these guys can execute, right?”
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