TED Talks Daily How competition is stifling AI breakthroughs | Llion Jones
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Feb 11, 2026 
Llion Jones, AI researcher and coauthor of the paper that introduced the transformer, talks about how open, pressure-free exploration produced major breakthroughs. He describes how competition and short-term incentives narrow research. He argues for more speculative, long-shot projects and shares examples of creative, curiosity-driven work that thrived when given freedom.
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Pressure Narrows AI Research
- The current AI boom has narrowed research as competition and investor pressure push groups toward safe, incremental work.
- Llion Jones argues this reduces creativity and risks missing the next conceptual leap.
Exploration Versus Exploitation
- AI development is stuck in an exploitation-heavy mode instead of exploring new approaches.
- Jones urges shifting the exploration–exploitation balance toward exploration to find breakthroughs.
Incremental Work Before Transformers
- Before transformers, researchers iteratively tuned recurrent networks, spending years on incremental tweaks.
- Jones suggests those efforts may have been wasted had transformers appeared earlier.