Google’s Missed AI Opportunity

Google’s oversight of the Transformer paper in 2017 cost them a staggering $6.2 billion – a combined valuation of the AI startups built by the researchers of the pivotal paper.

“No one knows my face or my name, but it takes five seconds to explain: ‘I was on the team that created the ‘T’ in ChatGPT’,” said Llion Jones, the last of the eight authors of the Transformer paper, titled ‘Attention Is All You Need’, who (also) left Google to start his own company – Sakana AI, alongside former Google research scientist David Ha.