Ilya Sutskever argued that from roughly 2012 to 2020, AI lived in an age of research, from 2020 to 2025 it entered an age of scaling, and now it is going back to research “with big computers.” However, release notes for almost any frontier model in 2026 show a familiar architecture diagram with a Transformer and Mixture-of-Experts, with headline improvements in data, context, reinforcement learning, synthetic tasks, tool use, memory, verification, adaptive reasoning budgets, and agent orchestration. This resembles Formula 1, where the chassis matters but the system around it increasingly decides the race. The age of research has returned, but much of that research is now expressed as industrial-scale engineering. “Scaling did not end. It escaped.”