Yi Tay: Gradient descent learning paradigm is AI's bottleneck, not architecture
Yi Tay · Captaining IMO Gold, Deep Think, On-Policy RL, Feeling the AGI in Singapore — Yi Tay · Jan 23, 2026 · at 49:07
Yi Tay, Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, discusses whether scaling context windows to hundreds of millions of tokens requires replacing Transformer architectures or changing learning algorithms.
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“It's not architecture itself. That's, that there's a problem that we, that is more of like the learning paradigm itself rather than the architecture itself. I think the architecture is just basically like the interface between the learning algorithm and the tokens. I think it's more about the learning algorithm itself.”
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