That's the thing with Deepmind though. They almost never actually end up advancing things because A) they don't release weights and B) they don't usually develo

That's the thing with Deepmind though. They almost never actually end up advancing things because A) they don't release weights and B) they don't usually develop their ideas into useful tools themselves, forcing others to redo all their work. So yeah, it's essentially a PoC PR stunt factory. Just look at AlphaZero. They make a huge deal about a suspiciously set up match against Stockfish. Supposedly revolutionising computer chess. But the problem is the computer chess community had to redo all of the work, including all the training to build Leela Chess Zero. Due to lack of Google-sized datacentres the training took years to catch up to the weights in AlphaZero. Same thing with AlphaGo, same thing with transformers. Now, in AI, usually getting a proof of concept is the easy part. Developing that into an idea that actually works in real world situations is usually the hardest part. I completely reject your idea that somehow the work by OpenAI is less worthy of recognition. I think that's just nonsense. And surely, Google created Deepmind to actually make them product ideas, not create new competitors, which is what has happened.