Meet the $4 Billion AI Superstars That Google Lost

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.

The paper’s eight authors had created the Transformer, a system that made it possible for machines to generate humanlike text, images, DNA sequences, and many other kinds of data more efficiently than ever before. Their paper would eventually be cited more than 80,000 times by other researchers, and the AI architecture they designed would underpin OpenAI’s ChatGPT (the “T” stands for Transformer), image-generating tools like Midjourney, and more.

There was nothing unusual about Google sharing this discovery with the world. Tech companies often open-source new techniques to get feedback, attract talent and build a community of supporters. But Google itself didn’t use the new technology straight away. The system stayed in relative hibernation for years as the company grappled more broadly with turning its cutting-edge research into usable services. Meanwhile, OpenAI exploited Google’s own invention to launch the most serious threat to the search giant in years. For all the talent and innovation Google had cultivated, competing firms were the ones to capitalize on its big discovery.

The researchers who co-authored the 2017 paper didn’t see a long-term future at Google either. In fact, all of them have since left the company. They’ve gone on to launch startups including Cohere, which makes enterprise software, and Character.ai, founded by Noam Shazeer, the longest-serving Googler in the group who was seen as an AI legend at the company. Combined, their businesses are now worth about $4.1 billion, based on a tally of valuations from research firm Pitchbook and price-tracking site CoinMarketCap. They are AI royalty in Silicon Valley.

Google’s $4 Billion ‘Transformer’ Club | Nearly all eight authors of a seminal AI research paper have left to start their own companies

The last of the eight authors to remain at Google, Llion Jones, confirmed this week that he was leaving to start his own company. Watching the technology he co-created snowball this past year had been surreal, he told me. “It’s only recently that I’ve felt … famous?” Jones says. “No one knows my face or my name, but it takes five seconds to explain: ‘I was on the team that created the ‘T’ in ChatGPT.’”

A Collaborative Time | 2017 was the golden year for Google researchers who developed the Transformer, or the ‘T’ in ChatGPT