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A.I. Brainiacs

As the industry relentlessly scales up, a handful of smaller companies are pursuing new model architectures that could enable greater efficiency without sacrificing performance. But first, do we need to figure out how the brain actually works?

Human Brain
Eventually, some company might achieve the fantasy of combining brain-like chips and brain-like algorithms. Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Ian Krietzberg
January 15, 2026

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If the A.I. industry had its own version of the Ten Commandments—perhaps inscribed on the wall of a data center somewhere in Santa Clara—one of them would inevitably read, “Thou shalt seek scale.” Indeed, the growth of the modern A.I. business is based on the foundational observation of researchers, which has yet to be proven wrong, that more capable systems derive from more model parameters, more training data, more chips, etcetera.