Yi Tay, former senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, discusses the architectural debate between hybrid neurosymbolic tool use and pure parameter-based foundation models.
Opinion
Yi Tay: Gap Between Closed AI Labs and Open-Source Is Increasing
“I think the gap is definitely increasing.”
Opinion
Yi Tay: IR and RecSys research lags significantly behind NeurIPS and ICML
“Also the IR community and the retrieval community is also like always behind the mainstream. And then now it's just probably gotten even more worse because of ILM and stuff. So, okay, I'm getting into Hottick territory, but it's just, like, certain conferences…”
Insight
Tay: Frontier AI researchers cannot maintain standard nine-to-five work-life balance
“You cannot be, like, checking out on, like, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and, like, work at, like, nine to five if you want to, like, Make progress, or like, some people are just so good at detaching, like, ok, like, you know, like, eight pm, I'm not going to, my…”
Opinion
Tay: Long context architecture is the future of AI over RAG
“And, yeah, I mean, I think long context is definitely the future, rather than rec. But I mean, they could be used in conjunction, like,”
Disclosure
DeepMind Abandoned AlphaProof to Run Gemini End-to-End for IMO Math
“We wanted to try to, like, use, actually use Gemini as an end-to-end model. Basically, no, no second system with alpha proof. No second system. In, text out.”
Opinion
Yi Tay: Today's Models Likely Couldn't Invent the Transformer from Pre-2015 Data
“Even today's models, they might not even be able to invent the transformer. Like, if you freeze the time at a certain time, and even you bring the time, I mean, the model is a transformer, so I just say there's no, assuming there's no leakage.”