30 Pages Posted: 12 Dec 2025 Last revised: 6 Jan 2026 Date Written: December 06, 2025 Abstract For the last decade, it has been hard to stray off the beaten path of accepted wisdom for what drives innovation. We have been held hostage to a painfully simple formula: scale model size and training data. A pervasive belief in scaling has resulted in a massive windfall in capital for industry labs and fundamentally reshaped the culture of conducting science in our field. Academia has been marginalize...