If Google didn't publish the Transformers paper their engineers would have given talks about it, would have used those ideas to apply to grad school, would have

If Google didn't publish the Transformers paper their engineers would have given talks about it, would have used those ideas to apply to grad school, would have switched companies and built a similar model that's just different enough not to technically be the same, and we would have reverse engineered it immediately. Simply knowing a few keywords would be enough for anyone competent to reproduce all of the work. The space of possible models is huge. And we don't know in which direction to go to build better models. But knowing the vague general direction is all it takes. Any researcher can follow along given that knowledge. That's true of a lot of science not just ML. No one has any secret sauce. Not even OpenAI.