The room is empty, as all the researchers behind the Transformers’ concept have all left the search engine to launch several start-ups, mainly in the field of generative AI.
Six years ago, the eight Google researchers published a major scientific paper entitled “Attention Is All You Need”, which paved the way for generative artificial intelligence. Six years later, however, none of them is still working at the search engine, reports Bloomberg.
Last week, Llion Jones, the last remaining co-author at Google, confirmed his departure by the end of the month. “Given the advances in AI, it’s the right time to build something new,” he tells Bloomberg. He explains that he wants to launch a start-up.
Concerning, the other authors of the study have also founded their own start-ups, mostly in the field of generative AI. Among them, Aidan Gomes heads the Canadian start-up Cohere, which raised $270 million in June. Cohere develops large-scale language models for enterprises.
The star is Noam Shazeer, creator of Character.AI, which offers conversational robots designed to embody real or fictional personalities, living or dead. In March, the company raised $150 million. Two other authors have created start-ups that are still in “stealth mode”, i.e. they have not yet revealed their identity or the project they are working on.
The scientific article “Attention Is All You Need” introduced the concept of Transformers, which constituted a primordial revolution in pushing back the boundaries in the training of artificial intelligence models. This concept is at the heart of new generative AI services, including OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT (the T in GPT stands for Transformer).
This research has led to the emergence of a service that could potentially challenge Google’s dominant position in online search. To prevent such a scenario from happening again, the group has changed its philosophy: it has decided to limit the publication of scientific articles, wishing first and foremost to integrate its latest technological advances into its products.
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