Comment by omcgrann

This is right, and it's more or less what I was arguing in the piece. Google built the transformer. That's not in dispute. The point is that they built it inside a research ecosystem that traces back through decades of publicly funded work--DARPA, NSF, university labs, the whole pipeline from perceptrons through backpropagation through the GPU computing that made large-scale training feasible.

Both things are true at the same time, and acknowledging the public foundation doesn't diminish the private achievement. It does raise a question about who should benefit from what gets built on top of it, which is what the piece is concerned with.