But it doesn't mean, idea is worthless.
You could have said same about Transformers, Google released it, but didn't move forward, turns out it was a great idea.
I don't think you can, Google looked at the research results, and continued researching Transformers and related technologies, because they saw the value for it particularly in translations. It's part of the original paper, what direction to take, give it a read, it's relatively approachable for being a machine learning paper :)
Sure, it took OpenAI to make it into an "assistant" that answered questions, but it's not like Google was completely sleeping on the Transformer, they just had other research directions to go into first.
> But it doesn't mean, idea is worthless.
I agree, they aren't, hope that wasn't what my message read as :) But, ideas that don't actually pan out in reality are slightly less useful than ideas that do pan out once put to practice. Root commentator seems to try to say "This is a great idea, it's all ready, only missing piece is for someone to do the training and it'll pan out!" which I'm a bit skeptical about, since it's been two years since they introduced the idea.
The core insight necessary for chatgpt was not scaling (that was already widely accepted): the insight was that instead of finetuning for each individual task, you can finetune once for the meta-task of instruction following, which brings a problem specification directly into the data stream.
A successful ternary model would basically erase all that value overnight. In fact, the entire stock market could crash!
Think about it: This is Microsoft we're talking about! They're a convicted monopolist that has a history of manipulating the market for IT goods and services. I wouldn't put it past them to refuse to invest in training a ternary model or going so far as to buy up ternary startups just to shut them down.
Want to make some easy money: Start a business training a ternary model and make an offer to Microsoft. I bet they'll buy you out for at least a few million even if you don't have a product yet!
Occam’s Razor suggests this simply doesn’t yield as good results as the status quo