I was just thinking earlier today how in an alternate universe, probably not too far removed from our own, Google has a monopoly on transformers and we are all stuck with a single GPT-3.5 level model, and Google has a GPT-4o model behind the scenes that it is terrified to release (but using heavily internally).
This was basically almost real.
Before ChatGPT was even released, Google had an internal-only chat tuned LLM. It went "viral" because some of the testers thought it was sentient and it caused a whole media circus. This is partially why Google was so ill equipped to even start competing - they had fresh wounds of a crazy media circus.
My pet theory though is that this news is what inspired OpenAI to chat-tune GPT-3, which was a pretty cool text generator model, but not a chat model. So it may have been a necessary step to get chat-llms out of Mountain View and into the real world.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-engineer-c...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/23/google-fi...
It would have been nice for me to be able to work a few more years and be able to retire
will your retirement be enjoyable if everyone else around you is struggling?
Now think about how often the patent system has stifled and stalled and delayed advancement for decades per innovation at a time.
Where would we be if patents never existed?
Who knows? If we’d never moved on from trade secrets to patents, we might be a hundred years behind.
To be fair, Google has a patent on the transformer architecture. Their page rank patent monopoly probably helped fund the R&D.
They also had a patent on map/reduce.