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To fair, Google invented transformers and contributed a lot of basic research. OpenAI made it bigger.
by aborsy 2y ago
To fair, Google invented transformers and contributed a lot of basic research. OpenAI made it bigger.
- Rinzler89 2y agoAnd Xerox invented the GUI and Kodak the digital camera, and look at them today. Inventing things is no guarantee of success.
- robertlagrant 2y agoYes, but look at the previous comment. How does "inventing transformers" marry with "Google has managers not visionaries"?
- jsjohnst 2y agoJust because a company is 99% one thing, doesn’t mean that the 1% remaining don’t have moments of real genius. What it does mean however is that when those real genius moments happen, the company isn’t in a good position to capitalize on it (ala Xerox or Kodak mentioned previously, but there are so many more).
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoBecause that's the hallmark of business-minded people being at the helm and not engineers, which has been an issue for Google for a long time: the greatest inventions ever seen will be squandered in terms of the org itself because management can't see beyond the next few quarters and won't invest properly in it.
- FactKnower69 2y ago??? Xerox and Kodak are immortal household names that dominated their niches for decades, what level of "success" would satisfy you? what are you lamenting, that they didn't completely enshittify their products while they were on top and torch their brands to the ground for a little more revenue?
- moritzwarhier 2y agoHe said that Xerox was not commercially successful with software or GUIs, and Kodak wasn't successful with digital cameras. In spite of Xerox labs having pioneered the windowed OS GUI with mouse and Kodak having built the first portable mass-market digital camera. They wouldn't have needed to enshittify or degrade their products to be successful with that, they just failed for other reasons.
- jsemrau 2y agoTransformers != Modern LLMs. It is 100% an important invention, but other important tech like hidden markov chains existed long before.
- woodson 2y agoWell, strictly speaking modern LLMs are transformers (not counting state space models like Mamba, for the moment). Not sure what hidden Markov chains have to do with modern LLMs.