Sundar Pichai: commitment

Transcript context

…I hadn't known that. Transformers were specifically— It was from our research teams, but they were guided by solving product problems. Transformers were immediately used. BERT and MUM, people underestimate how much, because we measure search quality so religiously. Some of the biggest jumps in search quality in that period where search went ahead of everyone else was because of BERT and MUM. We built Transformers and used it immediately in Search to improve language understanding, understanding web pages, understanding your queries, kept building better models. We also started productizing it internally in the form of, there were teams building something called LaMDA. Obviously, we weren't the first to ship that. But I think it's less to do with it was just research, and we weren't applying it in a product direction. That, I think, is just— You did this research, you then saw massive ROI from using it the way you intended, and then you didn't invent all of the products that were invented with it, but that's to be expected.…

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