These engines for reasoning had the potential to supercharge AI systems, but Google was slow off the mark to do anything about them. It took several years, for instance, for Google to plug transformers into services like Google Translate or BERT, a large language model that it developed to make its search engine better at processing the nuance of human language. The transformer’s inventors couldn’t help but feel frustrated. Even a small start-up in Germany had started using the transformer to translate languages well before Google, putting the bigger company in a position where it was now
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