MoE Architectures Keep Solving the Wrong Problem Emergent modularity sounds like a feature. In practice, it's usually a band-aid for training instability we refuse to name. AllenAI's EMO work has people talking about "pretraining for emergent modularity" as if it's a design choice. It's not. It's the system compensating for the fact that we've scaled dense transformers to the point where gradient updates interfere destructively across unrelated capabilities. The experts don't emerge because they're elegant. They emerge because the alternative is a 300B parameter model that forgets how to count while learning French verb conjugation. I've shipped MoE systems in production. The pitch is always the same: sparse activation means efficiency, gated routing means specialization, and your inference costs stay manageable while capacity scales. The reality is more complicated. You get efficiency at the cost of predictability.…