Jose Luis Uclés

In June 2017, eight Google researchers publish “Attention Is All You Need.” The paper invents the transformer architecture. Google’s response to inventing the foundation of modern AI? They assigned chatbot development to a “20% project.” Daniel De Freitas had to recruit an “army of helpers who were ignoring their day jobs” to build Meena in 2020. When Meena actually worked, executives killed it because it might “say dumb things.” Noam Shazeer, one of the eight transformer authors, built LaMDA on top of Meena. He wrote an internal memo called “Meena Eats the World” predicting it could replace Google Search and generate trillions in revenue. Google’s leadership response: we can’t release this, too risky. Shazeer and De Freitas quit in 2021. Google paid $2.7 billion to bring Shazeer back in 2024. Meanwhile, Ilya Sutskever left Google for OpenAI in 2015. Elon Musk personally recruited him. At the time, Google offered Sutskever $2 million to stay. He took a pay cut to join a nonprofit. OpenAI built GPT on the transformer architecture Google published. ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022, hit 100 million users in two months, and broke the record for fastest-growing consumer app ever. Google’s internal response? “Code red.” Sundar Pichai pulled engineers off other projects. Larry Page and Sergey Brin came out of semi-retirement. Bard launched in February 2023 and immediately told people to eat glue. Here’s what Brin’s admission actually reveals: Google’s culture became structurally incapable of taking asymmetric bets. The eight authors of “Attention Is All You Need” all left Google. They founded Cohere, Character.AI, Adept, Inceptive, Essential AI, and Sakana AI. They went to OpenAI. They scattered across the industry, taking the knowledge Google paid for and building competitors. This is what happens when a company optimizes for avoiding embarrassment over capturing upside. Google’s executives looked at chatbots and saw reputation risk. OpenAI looked at the same technology and saw the future of computing. Brin’s “we were too scared” framing actually understates the problem. This wasn’t fear of chatbots saying wrong things. This was fear of any product that couldn’t be perfectly controlled at launch. The same mindset that killed Google Glass, Google Plus, and a graveyard of internal projects that might have worked if they’d shipped them and iterated. The transformer paper has been cited 173,000 times. The irony is excruciating. Google invented the thing and then became a case study in how not to deploy it. And now the roles have reversed. Google just released Gemini 3, topped the benchmarks, grew to 650 million users. Sam Altman declared his own “code red” last week. OpenAI is delaying advertising and agent projects to focus on making ChatGPT better. The AI race is a leapfrog game where first-mover advantage lasted about eighteen months.