> they purposely did not bother releasing/continuing research to match openai, because it would kill their business. They certainly haven't matched openai - bu

> they purposely did not bother releasing/continuing research to match openai, because it would kill their business. They certainly haven't matched openai - but is there any evidence that's the reason? There's loads of other reasons Google could have dropped the ball: * Maybe they looked at the chatbots that existed in the past, and things like Siri and Cortana, and concluded that chat interfaces weren't a priority for them, and instead focused on things like image processing (which will surely be useful for self-driving cars) * Maybe they did initial, small-scale work and produced unexciting results, discouraging further investment. I don't imagine the researchers behind Microsoft's "Tay" chatbot were being lauded by their superiors. * Maybe they were hamstrung by an excess of ethics, such as deciding not to train their model on questionably licensed data scraped from the web. Or feeling it was wrong to release a model that would sometimes confidently make false claims, which might create dangerous situations, slander people, or suchlike. * Maybe they misallocated their resources, like putting too much of their budget into making five generations of their custom 'TPU' chips when everyone else just buys nvidia's cards. * Maybe they hired people who loved producing papers but weren't eager to deal with the hassle of supporting a production system. A common enough mindset in academia, where papers are productivity. And if the big paychecks keep rolling in whether you release something or not - why risk releasing something half-baked? * Maybe the people who were inclined to get their ML research into production all ended up working on gmail spam detection, adwords, youtube automatic subtitling, google translate, click fraud detection, and suchlike.