The tone on this could be improved. They literally answered your question "What lead?" and you seem dismissive.
replyYeah, you're right, maybe needlessly harsh, sorry for that. I guess I'm tired of the same argument that Google somehow had a lead in LLM development because Transformer comes from researchers who worked at Google, yet somehow what comes before/after Transformer doesn't count, coming from Google's researchers (BERT) or others (GPT), or going even earlier so, hence the whole "we stand on the shoulders of giants".
replyWe can go round and round about all this but I think it's pretty clear that google did at one point have a large AI lead in the lead up to covid. They had models that far surpassed the competition from 2018-2022. But they were facing an innovators dilemma, didnt want to cannibalize their search revenue so they sat on LLMs which ended up creating openAI and anthropic.
replydeleted
reply> Great, tell me again who put the Transformer into LLMs?
replyGoogle did, as they already said.
OpenAI was better at marketing and a lot more willing to cannibalize the search market as a newcomer. So Google blew their lead in research by not recognizing the product value quickly enough, or failing to win an internal political war on it anyway