Meet the $4 Billion AI Superstars That Google Lost
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These eight alumni made one of the biggest discoveries in AI, then left to build their own startups. Why did Google miss the boat?
In 2017, researchers at Alphabet Inc.’s Mountain View, California, headquarters were talking over their midday meal about how to make computers generate text more efficiently. Over the next five months they ran experiments and, not realizing the magnitude of what they’d discovered, wrote their findings up in a research paper called “Attention is All You Need.” The result was a leap forward in AI.
The paper’s eight authors had created the Transformer, a system that made it possible for machines to generate humanlike text, images, DNA sequences and many other kinds of data more efficiently than ever before. Their paper would eventually be cited more than 80,000 times by other researchers, and the AI architecture they designed would underpin OpenAI’s ChatGPT (the “T” stands for Transformer), image-generating tools like Midjourney and more.
There was nothing unusual about Google sharing this discovery with the world. Tech companies often open source new techniques to get feedback, attract talent and build a community of supporters. But Google itself didn’t use the new technology straight away. The system stayed in relative hibernation for years as the company grappled more broadly with turning its cutting-edge research into usable services. Meanwhile, OpenAI exploited Google’s own invention to launch the most serious threat to the search giant in years. For all the talent and innovation Google had cultivated, competing firms were the ones to capitalize on its big discovery.
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