Google is flailing. After years of singleminded worship of the false god Virtual Assistant, the company is rushing its AI strategy as its competitors join their hands and raise their pitchforks. The irony is it’s all happening because Google thought it had the pitchfork market cornered.
See, in 2017, Google researchers published the article “Attention is all you need,” introducing the concept of the transformer and vastly improving the capabilities of machine learning models. You don’t need to know the technical side of it (and indeed I am not the one to teach you), but it has been enormously influential and empowering; let it suffice to say that it’s the T in GPT.
You may well ask, why did Google give this wonderful thing away freely? While big private research outfits have been criticized in the past for withholding their work, the trend over the last few years has been towards publishing. This is a prestige play and also a concession to the researchers themselves...
