Also, there's a huge difference between "it works for an ML benchmark" and "it works for real life use cases". OpenAI has done a phenomenal job with instruction tuned models, enabling fine tuning for any use case very very easily, and deploying it all at decent scale.

Pretty sure that in some cases, AI researchers in some companies are like: "sorry we don't give training set nor source-code (detailed instructions how to reproduce the experiment) but it works perfectly and is revolutionary, now give me my PhD / funding to our company"

Google translate was updated to uss transformers I believe. And snippits uses some kind of AI summarization.

Indeed, let's not forget that Google's BERT model was a very hot topic a few years ago, and their in-house researchers literally invented the basis of all modern language modeling, word2vec. Maybe they've been resting on their laurels, but with all the growing hype around GPT models (even before ChatGPT), I'd be surprised if nobody at Google was already working on this stuff.

They literally invented transformers. "Open" AI is just productising google's research.

Go take a look at the publication lists for any major AI conference and peep how many of the papers come from Google. For any year in the last 15.

That’s the point: no amount of academic papers can be a good ROI for Google’s investment.

It’s very nice of them to do foundational research for the industry at large, but that is not most people’s definition of business success.

Google is not releasing a product because there is no product to release*. Open AI isn't really releasing a product either, they are trying to win marketshare and gain funding.

*At the very least, not enough of a product to make a release sensible. If they launch Google GPT and it sucks, their product is dead. If Open AI doesn't release their "product," their company is dead and they lose funding and marketshare (that is, marketshare of a future market). Apple isn't releasing anything either; do you think they have nobody working on it? Microsoft is trying to use chatGPT in an existing product (still behind a waitlist) which is probably just to test the usefulness of thier $20 B investment in Open AI. I think Google's research speaks for itself, the lack of a product doesn't speak to anything.

I think you’re being too charitable to Google. This is the company that released Duplex, Orkut, and about 100 other not-a-products.

Google is quiet because they can’t figure out how to release something that is 1) useful, and 2) not fatal to their core business.

Google’s entire empire is built on users having to run multiple searches and click through multiple links to find anything. Any kind of summarization/knowledge system that reduces wasted user time is necessarily bad news for Google.

Google’s research here is admirable. Their lack of productization (remember, they also claim to be years ahead) is a symptom of business mistakes coming home to roost.

This isn’t true at all. Google built BERT which is an encoder widely used throughout industry.