I thought that was pioneered in the paper that came out of Google?

Attention was first proposed in this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.0473.pdf and it is referenced from transformer paper.

at this rate no one ever invents anything cause everything is built on math

that some of the elements came out of somewhere else doesn't change the fact that Google came up with an impressive and game-changing piece of tech

It was not impressive at that time, because didn't achieve any quality breakthroughs. Later adapters of transformers like GPT and Bert achieved it with impressive results.