[wwind123]

I still remember back in 2005 when I just joined a company, a coworker was quipping Google is not a real elite company, because it doesn't even have a Turing Award winner. I showed him the news that Vint Cerf joined Google recently.

[FartyMcFarter]

Now they have several Turing Award winners, and several Nobel Prize winners.

[mahouk]

I wonder if the transformer inventors will ever get a Turing (honestly proving to be one of the most transformative - no pun intended - technologies of the millennium so far). I know pretty much all of them left Google but they'd still be counted as alumni.

[Chu4eeno]

Google's transformer paper was largely just stripping out parts of an earlier (now apparently largely forgotten) paper/model and running it on Google scale compute and data (which the original researchers obviously couldn't afford).

[wwind123]

Yeah, some work from Google has had an outsize impact on the entire industry. Won't be surprising if they eventually get a nod from the Turing Award. Including the main authors of the Transformer work for driving the LLM revolution, and Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat for driving the big data movement.