Google wrote the paper that made ChatGPT possible. Then decided not to build ChatGPT. Sergey Brin just explained why on stage at Stanford and the reason is more embarrassing than anyone expected.
In 2017, Google published the transformer paper. The architecture that powers every major AI model today. It came from their own researchers. Their own labs. Their own compute.
Then they sat on it.
Sergey was blunt about why. They underinvested in scaling the compute. They did not take it seriously enough. And when they finally had something worth shipping, they got scared. Chatbots say dumb things. Google had a reputation to protect. So they protected it instead of shipping.
OpenAI was not scared.
Ilya Sutskever, trained at Google, left and went there. Other Google researchers followed. They took the transformer architecture, scaled it, shipped it anyway, and captured the entire generative AI wave while Google watched.
Sergey called it a mistake at Stanford in front of hundreds of students.
The company that invented the technology did not build the product. The company that built the product did not invent the technology.
That is the most expensive case of corporate hesitation in the history of the industry.
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Watch the full interview YT.
Search: "Big ideas begin here: Sergey Brin at Stanford"