[dekhn]

I was really impressed with the work that Noam Shazeer was doing at Google before he left (I worked on TPUs and frequently had to debug problems at scale for researchers). It was clear he was making some pretty impressive improvements, but the results weren't super obvious even to most people inside google, and they didn't translate to externally visible projects.

This isn't that dissimilar to working at any sufficiently advanced R&D outfit, which strongly demonstrates the principle "the future is already here but isn't evenly distributed".