Zuzanna Stamirowska

But very concretely, what prompted us to start Pathway and to start working on post-transformer architectures was that we were looking forward to reasoning becoming a thing. We have a very strong background in dealing with the dimension of time in machine learning—any sort of online learning. And we saw RAG, context, and memory, and we’re talking about 2023 and 2024, as bottlenecks. They were not efficient or sufficient to unlock AI as we would like—AI with no ceiling, if you wish.

Specifically, we’re talking about continual learning, memory, and reasoning first. And as we moved through it, we realized that reasoning shouldn’t just be linguistic. Verbalizing things in chain of thought is not the optimal way to do reasoning. With chain of thought, we’re essentially gluing it on top of a transformer, and transformers are naturally ill-suited to dealing with time and learning from experience.

Latent thinking has huge benefits. It can help us solve constraint-satisfaction problems natively, like what we’re showing. We’re solving constraint-satisfaction problems and math with tiny, tiny models. And then there’s cost efficiency. There are just insane cost gains coming from latent reasoning.