Top of the class.
Illustration by Stephanie Davidson
, Columnist
Meet the $4 Billion AI Superstars That Google Lost
These eight alumni made one of the biggest discoveries in AI, then left to build their own startups. Why did Google miss the boat?
It seems fitting that one of Google’s most important inventions — one that would come back to haunt the company — was initially devised over lunch.
In 2017, researchers at Alphabet Inc.’s Mountain View, California, headquarters were talking over their midday meal about how to make computers generate text more efficiently. Over the next five months they ran experiments and, not realizing the magnitude of what they’d discovered, wrote their findings up in a research paper called “Attention is All You Need.” The result was a leap forward in AI.