Yi Tay: The AI Industry Is Stuck in a Transformer Local Minimum
Yi Tay · Captaining IMO Gold, Deep Think, On-Policy RL, Feeling the AGI in Singapore — Yi Tay · Jan 23, 2026 · at 50:43
Yi Tay, Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, discusses architectural inertia and why displacing the Transformer is exceptionally hard.
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“So now we are like in this local minima of like transformers, everything, everything, right? Maybe it's not easy to like get totally out Of this, because also a lot of people's investment optimization have been done. So the things that play well needs to play well with the ideas before. And the way I see it now is it's very difficult to like come out of it.”
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