Of course, in patent US11556786B2, Google finally mopped up the decoder-only idea. https://patents.google.com/patent/US11556786B2/en https://patents.google.com/

Of course, in patent US11556786B2, Google finally mopped up the decoder-only idea. https://patents.google.com/patent/US11556786B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US11556786B2/en "1. A method of generating an output sequence comprising a plurality of output tokens from an input sequence comprising a plurality of input tokens, the method comprising, at each of a plurality of generation time steps: generating a combined sequence for the generation time step that includes the input sequence followed by the output tokens that have already been generated as of the generation time step; processing the combined sequence using a self-attention decoder neural network, wherein the self-attention decoder neural network comprises a plurality of neural network layers that include a plurality of masked self-attention neural network layers, and wherein the self-attention decoder neural network is configured to process the combined sequence through the plurality of neural network layers to generate a time step output that defines a score distribution over a set of possible output tokens; and selecting, using the time step output, an output token from the set of possible output tokens as the next output token in the output sequence."