> but the researchers did their job.

And they are still doing their job, but not at Google. Almost all of the people who invented transformers are at their own startups right now. Even OpenAI has a splinter group, AnthropicAI, the one Google invested in.

There’s a difference between pure research and releasing an innovative product

And also, with regards to "they [Google] invented transformers", from what I can tell only two of the paper's eight authors are still at Google.

(I work at Google, but this is based on public sources.)

those people who created original transformer, large language models, and even this bard AI(lamda, meena) left the company