Research

Recent progress in artificial intelligence has been driven by empirical scaling laws linking performance improvements to increases in model parameters, data, and compute. These results have fueled the widespread belief that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will emerge primarily through continued scaling of large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we argue that this assumption conflates benchmark performance with intelligence and overlooks fundamental architectural limitations of current models. We propose Artificial Special Intelligence (ASI) as an alternative framework: intelligence arising from collections of small, specialized models that operate asynchronously, learn continuously, and interact with large-scale external memory. Drawing on evidence from machine learning, neuroscience, and cognitive science, we argue that intelligence is better characterized by structural properties—such as specialization, separation of compute and memory, and lifelong learning than by parameter count alone.

Topics of our research

Compute-Memory Separation

LLMs memorize more information as they grow larger. This leads to the illusion of intelligence as evaluations are gamified through overfitting. We train smaller models <100x the size of LLMs and complement them with infinite memory.

Asynchronous Thinking

Humans do not wait for sensory inputs to provide full context before starting the form thoughts or reply. LLMs however operate on full context which leads to slower outputs and inefficient compute utilization. Asynchronous thinking enables decoding over streaming inputs without waiting for full context.

Evaluation of Intelligence

Intelligence of agents is directly proportional to the GDP generated by the agents. We are moving from a world of static, academic, train-time evaluations to dynamic, real-world, test-time evaluations. This is non trivial as due to distribution shift during inference.

Continual Learning

Intelligence and Memory layers need to constantly stay relevant to the task in hand. Train time back propagation is time consuming, human in the loop RL generates bias. Hence it is important to continually learn during inference where one does not have the luxury of exploration in a simulated environment.

Modality Fusion

Babies learn to speak before they learn to write. Speech and Text can be learnt independently. Hence the mapping learnt between speech and text is in some sense - non-scientific, making fusing these modalities a hard problem. Additionally, audio being a dense signal is non-trivial to tokenize and map to text.

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