Sebastien Bourgeau, Google DeepMind pre-training lead for Gemini 3, explains how the AI development paradigm has evolved beyond training standalone neural network models.
“We're not really building a model anymore. I think we're really building a system at this point. People have sometimes this view that we're just training a neural network architecture and that's it. But it's really the entire system around the network as well that, that we're building collectively.”
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More from Sebastien Bourgeau
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Bourgeau: AI progress from pre-training improvements is not slowing down
“It's still remarkable how much progress we're able to achieve in this way, and it's not really slowing down.”
Sebastien BourgeauDec 18, 2025▶ 2:26”We’re Ahead of Where I Thought We’d Be” — Gemini 3 & the Future of AI
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Bourgeau: Google and DeepMind are actively researching post-Transformer architectures
“I believe so. There's groups doing research on the model architecture side, for sure, within Google and within DeepMind”
Sebastien BourgeauDec 18, 2025▶ 10:38”We’re Ahead of Where I Thought We’d Be” — Gemini 3 & the Future of AI
Insight
Bourgeau: Architecture and data innovation currently matter more than scale
“The other parts are architecture and data innovation. These also play a really, really important part in the Performance of pre-training and probably even more so than pure scale these days, but scaling is still an important factor as well.”
Sebastien BourgeauDec 18, 2025▶ 31:22”We’re Ahead of Where I Thought We’d Be” — Gemini 3 & the Future of AI
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Bourgeau: AI development is not running out of training data
“The other part of your question are we running out of data? I don't think so, so there's more.”
Sebastien BourgeauDec 18, 2025▶ 34:15”We’re Ahead of Where I Thought We’d Be” — Gemini 3 & the Future of AI
Insight
Bourgeau: AI research is shifting to a data-limited paradigm
“I think what might be happening instead is kind of a shift in paradigm where before we were kind of scaling in the data unlimited regime where, where data would scale as much as you would like. And we're kind of shifting more to a data limited regime, which ac…”
Sebastien BourgeauDec 18, 2025▶ 34:26”We’re Ahead of Where I Thought We’d Be” — Gemini 3 & the Future of AI
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Bourgeau: End-to-end differentiable retrieval and search in training will take years
“I think deep down, I do believe that the long-term answer is to learn this differentiable end-to-end way, which means probably doing pre-training or whatever that looks like in the future, Learn to retrieve as part of the training and learn how to do search as…”
Sebastien BourgeauDec 18, 2025▶ 40:09”We’re Ahead of Where I Thought We’d Be” — Gemini 3 & the Future of AI
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