Kind of a weird question. It definitely is a respected area of research, yeah, and Google no doubt do excellent work. Google's problem is not a lack of serious

Kind of a weird question. It definitely is a respected area of research, yeah, and Google no doubt do excellent work. Google's problem is not a lack of seriousness per se, it's that they seem to be stuck in a downward spiral of hard-left blank slateism that views the general public not as humans but as an unwashed mass whose brains are basically empty EEPROMs waiting to be flashed through the eyeballs. Whilst they are elite and super-smart and can handle AI, everyone else would be immediately converted into drooling zombies. So they've got stuck in this pattern that goes like: 1. OpenAI announce some cool new model that does something neat, invites friends and says open version will come later when they make it "safe", read: ideologically pure. When eventually released it's broken by the hacks they put in to try and meet their ill defined requirements e.g. see how "cowboy with a cat" got turned into a picture of an Asian woman but worked with cowgirls. 2. Google immediately release a web page stating that they were already doing that, and their version is better in every way, but it's far too dangerous to release. As a consequence nobody can verify their claims and their stuff is just ignored. 3. Eventually a mishmash of third parties duplicate the works based on their papers and make public stuff with it that isn't garbled by filtering. Sky proceeds to not fall. Google/OpenAI learn nothing. GOTO 1. This pattern happened with text transformer models, it happened with DALL-E, there are probably other examples too. For some reason AI researchers at these places believe that whilst Word / Photoshop / Blender / a painting easel is anodyne and safe technology, a tech that does the same thing more conveniently is a revolutionary social crisis in a box. No evidence for their beliefs on this matter is ever presented, because it's all based on ideological assumptions about human nature that are taken as axiomatic. Very sad. Google could be a leader in this space. Instead they've disappeared into a hole, terrified of the world outside.