alt Hacker NewsSo, I've been reading Google research papers for decades now and also worked there for a decade and wrote a few papers of my own.
When google publishes papers, they tend to juice the results significance (google is not the only group that does this, but they are pretty egregious). You need to be skilled in the field of the paper to be able to pare away the exceptional claims. A really good example is https://spectrum.ieee.org/chip-design-controversy while I think Google did some interesting work there and it's true they included some of the results in their chip designs, their comparison claims are definitely over-hyped and they did not react well when they got called out on it.
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Remember Google is a publicly traded company, so everything must be reviewed to "ensure shareholder value". Like dekhn said, its impressive, but marketing wants more than "impressive".
That applies to absolutely everyone. Convenient results are highlighted, inconvenient are either not mentioned or de-emphasized. You do have to be well read in the field to see what the authors _aren't_ saying, that's one of the purposes of being well-read in the first place. That is also why 100% of science reporting is basically disinformation - journalists are not equipped with this level of nuanced understanding.
The article you linked is not an example of this happening. Google open-sourced the chip design method, and uses it in production for TPU and other chips.
https://github.com/google-research/circuit_training
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/how-alphachip-transfor...