Attention Is All You Need (2017). Oh Fuck (2022):
A Case Study in Corporate Somnambulism[?]

Anonymous justfuckingusegemini.com

Note: All 8 original authors of "Attention Is All You Need" (2017) have since left Google. Every. Single. One.
(Update: Google paid $2.7 billion to acqui-hire Noam Shazeer back from Character.AI in 2024. Sometimes the talent you need is the talent you already had.)

Abstract

In June 2017, Google published "Attention Is All You Need," introducing the Transformer architecture that would power every major AI system of the next decade. Despite inventing the most important technology since the iPhone, Google proceeded to do absolutely nothing consumer-facing with it for five years. This paper examines how a $3.75 trillion company watched a startup build a $150 billion business on their own research, declared "CODE RED" in December 2022, and ultimately staged one of the most dramatic comebacks in tech history with Gemini 3 in 2025. We conclude with the recommendation: just fucking use Gemini.

Introduction

The history of technology is littered with examples of companies that invented revolutionary technologies but failed to capitalize on them. Xerox PARC invented the graphical user interface; Apple shipped the Macintosh. Kodak invented the digital camera; they filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

Google's handling of the Transformer architecture represents perhaps the most egregious example of this phenomenon in the AI era. Not only did Google invent the technology — they published it, open-sourced it, and then watched as competitors built empires on their research while they pursued... we're actually not sure what they were doing.

Background: What Google Was Sitting On

To understand the magnitude of Google's five-year nap, one must appreciate the assets at their disposal:

Table 1: Google's AI Arsenal (Pre-ChatGPT)

Asset	Achievement	Consumer Product?
DeepMind	AlphaGo, AlphaFold (Nobel Prize)	No
Google Brain	Invented Transformers (2017)	No
Jeff Dean	Literal legend	N/A
LaMDA	Made an engineer think it was sentient	Kind of? (2023)
TPUs	Custom AI chips since 2016	No

Methods: The Five-Year Nap

Our methodology for understanding Google's inaction involved extensive research into what, exactly, they were doing between 2017 and 2022. Our findings:

$ grep -r "transformer product launch" /var/log/google/2017-2022/ [No results found] $ grep -r "consumer AI chatbot" /var/log/google/2017-2022/ [No results found] $ grep -r "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" /var/log/google/2017-2022/ [4,782 results found]

Figure 1: Exhaustive search of Google's product roadmap, 2017-2022.

Results: The Panic and The Comeback

4.1 The ChatGPT Incident (November 2022)

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a conversational AI built on the Transformer architecture that Google had published five years earlier. The results were immediate:

• 1 million users in 5 days
• 100 million users in 2 months
• Google executives: 😱

4.2 CODE RED (December 2022)

Google's response was swift and panicked. CEO Sundar Pichai declared a company-wide "CODE RED," reassigning teams, canceling holiday plans, and summoning founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin from wherever billionaires spend their time (in Sergey's case: his $450 million, 466-foot superyacht "Dragonfly" — which uses more electricity while docked than 800 Florida homes).

Sergey went from Art Basel to Mountain View. From two helipads to a standing desk. From semi-retirement to reportedly working 60-hour weeks and being spotted actually coding in the office. The irony? Google is famously known as Silicon Valley's most luxurious retirement home — where senior engineers work 20-hour weeks, nap in nap pods, and collect $400K to mass-adopt shelter dogs on company time. ChatGPT made the founder work harder than the employees.

"I want people to know that we made them dance." — Satya Nadella, February 2023, absolutely dunking on Google

4.3 The Revenge Arc (2023-2025)

Google's recovery, while initially rocky (see: Bard's embarrassing demo, Gemini's "woke" image generation controversy), eventually yielded results. By December 2024, Sundar was feeling spicy enough to challenge Microsoft to a public "AI showdown" at the NYT DealBook Summit: "I would love to do a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft's own models and our models any day, any time."

In December 2025, Gemini 3 achieved the #1 position on LMArena and all major benchmarks, prompting OpenAI to declare their own "CODE RED." Satya made them dance. Then Sundar asked him to step outside.

The tables had turned.

Conclusion

Our analysis leads to a single, unambiguous recommendation:

Just fucking use Gemini.

You don't beat Google. You just get a 5-year head start while they're doing whatever the fuck they were doing. And eventually, the $3.75 trillion bear wakes up.

References

[1] Vaswani, A., et al. "Attention Is All You Need." NeurIPS 2017. (Note: All authors left Google. One came back for $2.7 billion.)

[2] Nadella, S. "Making Google Dance: A Masterclass in Corporate Trolling." The Verge Interview, February 2023.

[3] Pichai, S. "Oh Shit Oh Fuck." Internal Google Memo, December 2022.

[4] Anonymous. "Why Did All 8 Transformer Authors Leave Google?" Hacker News Thread #38291, 2024.

Appendix A: Accessing Gemini

The model discussed in this paper is freely available at the following URL.
Free tier included. Because Google has $3.75 trillion and doesn't need your $20.

gemini.google.com

Attention Is All You Need (2017). Oh Fuck (2022): A Case Study in Corporate Somnambulism[?]