Comment by Aurornis
5 hours ago
The article is vague about the companies in the paper, for some reason.
In the paper, OpenAI is at the top of the chart for cumulative citations. MEGVII, Hugging Face, Waymo, Momenta, Preferred Netowkrs, Anthropic, Owkin, and Databricks, and Aibee follow (in that order). Yes, that is citations, not publications, but they explain that they're trying to use that as a proxy for significance, albeit an imperfect one.
Companies like Google aren't included because they aren't unicorn startups.
Google published a lot. I still wonder this original transformer paper, and the attention, etc. Why would they allow it to let go in the open? Perhaps because was intended for translation first before someone decided to loop it over itself? Or was so obscure to fellow researchers what do they actually publish?
It took 6 years to get from Attention Is All You Need to a consumer product. Up until ChatGPT’s release, LLMs were obscure and really were just fancier autocomplete. Deepmind was largely a speculative research division until Google decided to play catch up, and even that took a bit of time as they figured out how to proceed in a way that wouldn’t cannabalize search. So in short they didn’t realize the potential. Thats my somewhat naive take.
Google itself was shipping transformer-based features to consumers within 2 years, notably BERT for websearch.
databricks is a top ai startup?. i thought they did spark hosting or something.
what makes them a top ai startup
$160 billion valuation and market capture among some top (non-AI, traditional enterprise) companies, I think.
Yeah, but that capture is usually just hosted spark usage.
The AI usage has mostly been getting it to explain error messages