TheSequence Opinion #904: The Age of Research Is Overrated. AI Engineering Is Winning

Substack · 1 month ago · 50

Ilya Sutskever sketched three eras of modern AI: research-focused (2012–2020), scaling-dominated (2020–2025), and research returning with bigger computers from 2025 onward. Frontier models in 2026 still use Transformers with Mixture-of-Experts routing, with improvements coming mainly from data quality, context length, reinforcement learning, and system-level engineering rather than novel architectures. The field is blurring the line between research and engineering, with scaling continuing but disguised as engineering optimizations across the entire system.