South Africa tour of India 2019
Google is slipping from power
Google is in turmoil. The corporation is pushing its AI strategy as its rivals join hands and raise their pitchforks after years of unwavering devotion to the false deity Virtual Assistant. The irony is that Google believed it had the pitchfork market cornered, and now it's all occurring.
See, in the essay "Attention is all you need," written by Google researchers in 2017, the transformer idea was introduced, greatly enhancing the capabilities of machine learning models. It has been really impactful and empowering, but you don't need to understand the technical side of it (and in fact, I'm not the one to educate you); suffice it to say that it's the T in GPT.
Why would Google offer this fantastic item for free, you may easily wonder. While large private research organisations have always faced criticism for keeping their work secret, publishing has become more popular in recent years. This is a prestige move as well as a nod to the researchers, who would prefer it if their company did not try to keep their work under wraps. There's probably some hubris involved as well: How is it possible for Google to not fully utilise the technology they invented? You can definitely see how influential corporations like Google both follow and influence trends.
Comments