Sam Altman on Google: OpenAI's Survival is a Miracle, Google Should Have Dominated Everything
Altman: OpenAI's Survival is a Miracle, Google Could Have Dominated
Sam Altman stated regarding Google that OpenAI's survival is purely a miracle, and Google should have dominated everything.
He pointed out that corporate malaise and conservative management have led Google to be passive in the AI field; all eight authors of the 2017 Transformer paper left Google to start their own companies, supporting firms like Character.ai and Cohere; to protect its search advertising cash flow, internal reviews are heavy, and results are delayed in being made public; in 2024, Google spent about $2.7 billion to indirectly buy back people like Noam Shazeer through technology licensing.
After talent and technology flowed out of large companies, they are now returning, reshaping the competitive landscape of AI driven by events, with flexible startups benefiting while traditional giants face pressure from internal processes.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
After Google published the Transformer paper in 2017, which laid the foundation for large models, core authors gradually left to found or join companies like OpenAI, Character.ai, Cohere, and Adept, creating a talent outflow path that Altman has publicly stated would have made it difficult for OpenAI to exist today if Google had fully committed early on.
The allocation of resources is driven by the protection of the search advertising cash flow worth hundreds of billions, with cautious internal reviews and productization leading to delays in releasing R&D results, motivated by the desire to avoid disrupting existing business models, while also repurchasing key talent through high-value licensing deals to strengthen Gemini.
This is similar to Microsoft's early conservative cases in search or mobile, or IBM's path dependency during the PC era; currently, the industry is transitioning from laboratory advantages to commercial execution capabilities, shifting from paper dominance to competition in deployment and speed.
Essentially, this represents a transfer of pricing power: core talent and architecture are shifting from monopolies within large companies to a decentralized entrepreneurial ecosystem, where the mechanism is that when protecting existing cash flow takes precedence over aggressive innovation, technological advantages are diluted by external speed.
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