Yi Tay: IR and RecSys research lags significantly behind NeurIPS and ICML
Yi Tay · Captaining IMO Gold, Deep Think, On-Policy RL, Feeling the AGI in Singapore — Yi Tay · Jan 23, 2026 · at 1:17:23
Yi Tay (Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind) discusses his experience researching Information Retrieval (IR) and Recommendation Systems (RecSys) compared to core language modeling.
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“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 are just like behind NeurIPS and ICML and stuff. Yeah, some conferences are just like, they're just like applying things that, that they're downstream of. They're downstream. So it always feels very uninspiring to work on, on this.”
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