Sam Altman on Google: OpenAI surviving is nothing short of a miracle—Google should have dominated everything! Big company syndrome and conservative management have made Google very passive in the current AI landscape. The 2017 Transformer paper, which laid the foundation for large models, had 8 authors—all of whom left Google to start their own ventures, now powering half the industry with platforms like http://Character.ai, Cohere, Adept, and more. To protect its hundreds of billions in search ad revenue, Google has an extremely heavy internal review process, leaving lab research results stuck and unable to be released externally. In 2024, Google had no choice but to spend $2.7 billion to essentially "buy back" former employees like Noam Shazeer through technology licensing deals.