Google did 'basically nothing' with the Transformer paper, argues ex-dev advocate
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-09-15
@petergostev pushes back on the idea that the Transformer paper counts as Google shipping anything:
- The 2017 paper was written by a set of researchers; the only thing Google as an organisation did was not block publication — it did basically nothing with the research, which is probably why it wasn't blocked
- He stresses this isn't criticism of Google's researchers, who were brilliant, but of the culture at the time: nothing that would be useful to normal developers actually shipped
- Counterfactual: had Google built GPT-1, 2, 3 after publishing, AI progress could have advanced by multiple years; instead, those researchers all left Google
A case study of big-lab 'invent but never ship' culture.
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