Yi Tay: The Architecture That Achieves AGI Will Still Be a Transformer
Yi Tay · Captaining IMO Gold, Deep Think, On-Policy RL, Feeling the AGI in Singapore — Yi Tay · Jan 23, 2026 · at 46:26
Google DeepMind senior research scientist Yi Tay discusses whether transformer architectures and self-attention will remain dominant through the achievement of AGI.
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“It will be a transformer, I think. Like people, it depends on what you call it, but I think unless the paradigm shifts completely, which is, I mean, as a scientist, you cannot like completely say no to like that, this would never happen. But my feeling is that it's been like, what, like almost 10 years since the transformer? I think we have not replaced self retention. Like it's some form of it. Like you could rename it, you could name it something else. You could sometimes do local global. Yeah. It's still a transformer in the end. And I think like that's not going like anywhere, unless the whole thing with like back prop, like everything like goes, like the whole thing, this changes completely.”
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