Google originally developed Transformers in 2017, and then proceeded to deploy them to enhance the results on a dead end of search they were already on. [1]
It could be argued that nobody saw what will happen 6 years later. When we wrote the "Age of Page Rank is Over" article [2] just 4 months ago, many people did not understand what we talked about in the second part of the article although GPT3 was already a thing.
GPT-3 was unveiled 2.5 years ago, and it was very well-received at the time… and since. As was DALL-E and Midjourney.
This entire time Google has just responded with “Yeah, all this AI stuff like transformers and diffusers, GANs etc? That’s transformative tech. We’ve got something way better though. No you can’t see it or use it, no we won’t use it to make it so our website stops being primarily an index of Pinterest and Yummly. Our product is literally so good that we cannot bring it to market.”
If:
>Short term profits over long term profits are favored by Wall Street.
Then: Why did they spend so much money inventing tech that so far has pretty much only allowed Microsoft to take money out of their pockets?
I’m genuinely trying to figure out a perspective where Google doesn’t look like a clown car.