PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Yi Tay

Yi Tay leads the Singapore Gemini team at Google DeepMind as of October 2026. He co-wrote the Long Range Arena benchmark and the Synthesizer paper in 2020, then UL2 and the Differentiable Search Index paper in 2022. In 2021 he co-authored Beyond Fully-Connected Layers with Quaternions, one of eight papers to earn an ICLR 2021 Outstanding Paper award. From 2023 to 2024 he co-founded Reka AI, and in November 2024 he returned to Google DeepMind. In 2025 he co-captained the Gemini model that achieved the IMO gold medal and co-founded Google DeepMind Singapore with Quoc Le.

Works
138

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Timeline

  1. 2019–2020

    Long Range Arena and Synthesizer

    He completes a PhD at Nanyang Technological University in 2019. In 2020 he co-writes the Long Range Arena benchmark and the Synthesizer paper on self-attention.

  2. 2021

    An ICLR 2021 outstanding paper

    He co-authors Beyond Fully-Connected Layers with Quaternions, one of eight papers to earn an ICLR 2021 Outstanding Paper award.

  3. 2022

    UL2 and Differentiable Search Index

    In 2022 he co-writes UL2, a unified framework for pre-training models, and the Differentiable Search Index paper.

  4. March 2023

    Leaving Google Brain

    He leaves Google Brain and Google Research in March 2023, having spent about 3.3 years there. At Google Brain he is one of the modeling and architecture co-leads for PaLM 2.

  5. 2023–2024

    Co-founding Reka AI

    From 2023 to 2024 he co-founds Reka AI, a startup whose team builds a GPT-4-class multimodal model in under a year.

  6. November 2024

    Back at Google DeepMind

    He returns to Google DeepMind as a senior staff research scientist in November 2024.

  7. 2025

    IMO gold and a Singapore lab

    In 2025 he co-captains the Gemini model that achieves the IMO gold medal, and he co-founds Google DeepMind Singapore with Quoc Le.

  8. As of October 2026

    Singapore Gemini team lead

    As of October 2026, he leads the Singapore Gemini team at Google DeepMind.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Yi Tay yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. About — Yi Tay yitay.net. Checked 15 October 2026.
  2. [2011.04006] Long Range Arena: A Benchmark for Efficient Transformers arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  3. [2005.00743] Synthesizer: Rethinking Self-Attention in Transformer Models arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  4. AWS scientist wins ICLR outstanding paper award - Amazon Science amazon.science. Checked 15 October 2026.
  5. ICLR Spotlight Beyond Fully-Connected Layers with Quaternions: Parameterization of Hypercomplex Multiplications with $1/n$ Parameters iclr.cc. Checked 15 October 2026.
  6. [2205.05131] UL2: Unifying Language Learning Paradigms arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  7. [2202.06991] Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  8. Leaving Google Brain — Yi Tay yitay.net. Checked 15 October 2026.
  9. Yi Tay yitay.net. Checked 15 October 2026.
  10. Returning to Google DeepMind — Yi Tay yitay.net. Checked 15 October 2026.
  11. 2025 introspections: my year back at Google — Yi Tay yitay.net. Checked 15 October 2026.