Join leaders in Boston on March 27 for an exclusive night of networking, insights, and conversation. Request an invite here. Seven of the eight authors of the landmark ‘Attention is All You Need’ paper, that introduced Transformers, gathered for the first time as a group for a chat with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a packed ballroom at the GTC conference today. They included Noam Shazeer, co-founder and CEO of Character.ai; Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere; Ashish Vaswani, co-founder and CEO of Essential AI; Llion Jones, co-founder and CTO of Sakana AI; Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol; Jakob Uskhoreit, co-founder and CEO of Inceptive; and Lukasz Kaiser, member of the technical staff at OpenAI. Niki Parmar, co-founder of Essential AI, was unable to attend. In 2017, the eight-person team at Google Brain struck gold with Transformers — a neural network NLP breakthrough that captured the context and meaning of words more accurately than its predecessors: the recurrent neural network and the long short-term memory network

All weekend, it seemed like my social media feed was little more than screenshots and memes and links to headlines that either poked fun or took painful stabs at Google’s so-called ‘woke’ Gemini AI model. Days after Google said it had “missed the mark” by outputting ahistorical and inaccurate Gemini images, X (formerly Twitter) had a field day with screenshots of Gemini output that claimed “it is not possible to definitely say who negatively impacted society more, Elon tweeting memes or Hitler.” In particular, VC Marc Andreessen spent the weekend gleefully re-posting inaccurate and offensive outputs that he claimed were “deliberately programmed with the list of people and ideas its creators hate.” This whiplash-inducing shift from the positive response Google received after Gemini’s release in December — with its “Google-will-finally-take-on-GPT-4” vibes — is especially notable because just a little over a year ago, the New York Times reported that Google had declared a “code red” as ChatGPT’s release in November 2022 set off a generative AI boom, potentially leaving the search engine giant in the dust. Even though its researchers had helped build the technology underpinning ChatGPT, Google had long been wary of damaging its brand, the New York Times article said — while new companies like OpenAI “may be more willing to take their chances with complaints in exchange for growth.” But with ChatGPT booming, according to a memo and audio recording, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had “been involved in a series of meetings to define Google’s AI strategy, and he has upended the work of numerous groups inside the company to respond to the threat that ChatGPT poses.”