Source: I worked there
Culture is overrated. Money talks.
They did things far more complicated from an engineering perspective. I am far more impressed by what they accomplished along TSMC with Apple Silicon than by what AI labs do.
Google invented the transformer architecture, the backbone of modern LLMs.
"Google" did? Or humans who worked there and one who didn't?
https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-...
In any case, see the section on Jakob Uszkoreit, for example, or Noam Shazeer. And then…
> In the higher echelons of Google, however, the work was seen as just another interesting AI project. I asked several of the transformers folks whether their bosses ever summoned them for updates on the project. Not so much. But “we understood that this was potentially quite a big deal,” says Uszkoreit.
Worth noting the value of “bosses” who leave people alone to try nutty things in a place where research has patronage. Places like universities, Xerox, or Apple and Google deserve credit for providing the petri dish.