Voices · Trend watch (originally 2025-12-22)
From the Jul 22, 2026 daily brief
In his year-end interview (we only obtained the transcript last night), Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis took on the "scaling has hit a wall" thesis head-on: "we've never really seen any wall, as such," only diminishing returns — and diminishing isn't binary: "It's either exponential, or it's asymptotic. No. Actually, there's a lot of room between those two regimes." Gemini 3's gains are his evidence. On the data-exhaustion worry, he argues verifiable domains offer a way out: "in certain domains like coding and math, where you can verify the answer, in some sense, you could produce unlimited data." And on allocation: "you can think of as 50% of our effort is on scaling, 50% of it is on innovation. And my betting is you're going to need both to get to AGI" (GDM Podcast, 2025-12). This is the weightiest first-hand counter-evidence on the anti-wall side of the ledger, and a rare direct read on a lab's resource allocation — but all of it is a single source describing itself, not a third-party measurement.
Just an email address, unsubscribe anytime. This is the only thing we ask of you.
swyx, the AI-engineering commentator and co-host of the Latent Space podcast, put it flatl…
Sholto Douglas, a reinforcement-learning researcher at Anthropic, predicted in a post: "So…
Dwarkesh Patel is an independent tech interviewer and writer whose deep AI-industry essays…
Thompson writes Stratechery and is among the most-cited analysts on industry strategy. In …