Yes, I stopped reading when it mentioned the last good paper was from 2017. This is simply not true. I don't have time to go through all of their papers right now, but as someone else mentioned the protein folding one was a real breakthrough. They also have lots of great stuff in the NLP space (something similar to gpt-3 like 2 years earlier). Also tons of stuff on the actual training architecture/methods.
Edit: I want to add that saying the title has nothing to do with the article is not helping the case. I finished reading the article in case I was being unfair, but I still stand with my original comment.
It says the high point is 2017, not the last good paper. There are of course other good papers coming out go Google. But the novelty is dropping and the angst is increasing.
But this is false as well. Bert was a great breakthrough in NLP in late 2018. IMO bigger breakthrough than AlphaGo, but less media friendly. It has freaking 16 000 citations and it's used all across industry.
Journalists were asking people from DeepMind why winning in Go is important. They said because it may lead to breakthrough in e.g. medicine. Well it didn't, at least not yet and not directly.
But we still got AlphaFold. And AlphaFold is the type of breakthroughs DeepMind is meant to make. Not playing games.
I think judging the decline of a rapidly evolving field by literally one of the biggest breakthroughs in its entire history is not good. I also don't like clickbait and I think the audience here generally doesn't either, even if you justify it at the end.
To be fair, you wouldn't know that from the article's subtitle:
> What does Timnit Gebru’s firing and the recent papers coming out of Google tell us about the state of research at the world’s biggest AI research department.
I read the article and I don't get what's the focus of it. It seems a disconnected rambling about vague deep learning issues with Gebru's name interspersed several time in the text as to suggest her relevance.
Edit: I want to add that saying the title has nothing to do with the article is not helping the case. I finished reading the article in case I was being unfair, but I still stand with my original comment.