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Transformers: The "T" in ChatGPT

and how Google lost $4B worth of AI talent

Did you know that Google lost all 8 scientists who invented the “T” in ChatGPT?

The “T” stands for the Transformer🤖.

This is a type of neural network that can process data, images, or text, by using a technique called attention. It can read a sentence word by word, remembers what came before, and thinks about what comes next, so it understands the whole story. [more on how it works: here]

The Transformer was developed in 2017

Before the Transformer, everyone was using recurrent neural networks (RNN) — and at that point, everyone thought this was the cutting edge for AI.

But eight scientists from Google thought otherwise.

Their first experiment was to work on a simple new technique to improve Google Translate.

Remember using Google Translate in 2017? Terrible right?

And suddenly, the 2018 Google Translate version works much better.

You guessed it - it was the Transformer and the work behind the most famous AI paper, called “Attention Is All You Need”.

Their work forever changed the capabilities of Gen AI — and as we know it today, this technique is used for more than translation.

We now have Dalle-2, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, Claude-2, Bard, and Antrhopic — all because of the Transformer.

Yet, Google didn’t act on it

The biggest miss in Google’s history is that they didn’t use the Transformer to ship a language model before OpenAI.

If they acted on it — they had the resources, the knowledge, and the capital to ship their own ChatGPT by 2019.

That’s how early they were.

And yet, the system stayed in hibernation for years.

Meanwhile, OpenAI exploited Google’s own invention to launch the most serious threat to the search giant in years.

And the people behind it — are the hottest profiles in Silicon Valley right now, and almost all of them left Google to start their own company. Their startups in total are worth 4 Billion dollars today.

Why Google missed it?

A few reasons might be valid here.

First, Google is huge, and they have many layers of management. And maybe this project didn’t see the light of day because it wasn’t prioritized.

Second, this new model was potentially harmful to their ad model — the famous 10 blue links.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

🟢 Wix will let you build an entire website using just AI prompts. Their bet is on algorithms instead of templates — Everything, from the design to text and images, will then be automatically generated for you, and from the looks of things, it’ll be pretty fast. I think this is the best execution for an AI builder in the no-code space.

🟢 Seems like OpenAI + Google are fighting for “AI news”. Google is secretly pitching a new AI tool called "Genesis.” — that can write news for big publications like the New York Times and others. And OpenAI just partnered with the American Journalism project to support the local news field. They invested $5 Million dollars to help local news get the right AI tools.

🟢 ChatGPT is no longer going to say “as a large language model…” 👇🏻

RESOURCES

The best resources we came across lately that will help you become better at writing prompts & building AI apps.

🟣 Curated resources for LLMs deployment [ mega resource ]

TOOLBOX

The latest AI tools to use or get inspiration from.

PROMPT OF THE DAY

TOOL

Midjourney with text and image prompt

TEXT PROMPT

1990s, street style photo, Lomography film, a man wearing white vintage-inspired attire, sitting in a cozy cafe, warm redscale coloring --ar 7:4 --no windows --chaos 5 --stylize 150 --weird 50 --v 5.2

IMAGE PROMPT

RESULT