Transformer vs Post-Transformer | ft. Lukasz Kaiser, Adrian Kosowski, Mathias Lechner, & Llion Jones

Watch the inventors of the Transformer and the Post-Transformer Era debate head-to-head in a boxing ring! Brought to you by Pathway. This is the complete showdown between the titans shaping trillion-dollar markets, presented by their very authors. The Wall Street Journal just predicted that 2026 is the year Post-Transformers will rule AI. On May 5 in San Francisco, Pathway made that prediction a reality in the most memorable way possible: a fast-paced evening of punchy rounds, playful rebuttals, crowd-fueled energy, and a clapometer that decides who takes the title. In front of a room full of researchers, founders, investors, and diplomats. Watch the full recording to find the arguments building towards the knockout punches, and who won. 🥊 In the ring: Łukasz Kaiser, co-inventor of the Transformer, co-author of TensorFlow, co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-5, and the o1/o3 reasoning models. Researcher at OpenAI and Google Brain. Adrian Kosowski, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Pathway, inventor of the Dragon Hatchling (BDH) architecture, and early pioneer of HNSW. PhD at 20, tenured at Inria at 23. Author of 100+ papers across graph algorithms, distributed systems, and quantum information. Llion Jones, co-inventor of the Transformer (yes, along with Łukasz Kaiser), but fighting for the Post-Transformer side! Co-founder and CTO of Sakana AI, former Google Brain, building nature-inspired AI systems and evolutionary model merging. Mathias Lechner, Co-founder and CTO of Liquid AI and Research Affiliate at MIT CSAIL. One of the minds behind Liquid Neural Networks, with award-winning work on robust and trustworthy machine learning at IST Austria. 🥊 Moderators: Dexter Horthy and Zuzanna Stamirowska (CEO, Pathway) Chapters 00:00 Welcome to the Post Transformers Era 01:00 Format for the Transformer Vs Post-Transformer Debate 01:45 Meet Llion Jones of Sakana AI and co-inventor of the Transformer 02:37 Meet Mathias Lechner of Liquid AI 03:12 Meet Adrian Kosowski of Pathway, Inventor of BDH 03:51 Meet Łukasz Kaiser, Co Inventor of the Transformer 04:40 Fight Rules: Transformers vs Post Transformers 06:30 Łukasz Kaiser on Why Transformers Still Win 10:08 Adrian Kosowski on BDH and the PageRank Moment for Intelligence 14:39 Mathias Lechner on Transformers and Post Transformers 17:35 Llion Jones on Why Transformers is Not the Final Architecture 22:50 Can Post Transformers Beat the Transformer Stack? Inventors' Rebuttals 23:35 Hardware, RNNs, and Why Transformers Work: Łukasz Kaiser's Take 26:36 Adrian Kosowski on Latent Reasoning, BDH, and State 29:50 Mathias Lechner on KV Cache, Fast Weights, and Self Replacing AI 32:03 Llion Jones on the Hardware Lottery and Escaping Local Minima 35:34 Defining Intelligence for AGI 40:28 Reasoning Beyond Language 44:15 Scaling Laws: Transformer vs Post Transformer 49:13 Real World Deployments, Hardware, and Edge AI 50:31 Benchmarks, Coding Models, and Perplexity 53:48 Closing Arguments: Who Wins the Architecture Fight? 58:47 Audience Q&A: Hardware Lottery and the 10x Bar 1:04:00 Continual Learning and Dynamic Weights 1:15:03 Fine Tuning, Latent Reasoning, and Safety 1:17:26 Crowd Vote: Transformers vs Post Transformers 1:18:43 Debate Winners and Closing LINKS: 🐉 BDH paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26507 🌐 Pathway: https://pathway.com Subscribe to Pathway for ringside access to the researchers redrawing the frontier of AI. #PostTransformer #AI #DragonHatchling #BDH #Pathway #LiquidAI #SakanaAI #Transformers #LLM #continuallearning