> Google invented...

"Google" did? Or humans who worked there and one who didn't?

https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-...

In any case, see the section on Jakob Uszkoreit, for example, or Noam Shazeer. And then…

> In the higher echelons of Google, however, the work was seen as just another interesting AI project. I asked several of the transformers folks whether their bosses ever summoned them for updates on the project. Not so much. But “we understood that this was potentially quite a big deal,” says Uszkoreit.

Worth noting the value of “bosses” who leave people alone to try nutty things in a place where research has patronage. Places like universities, Xerox, or Apple and Google deserve credit for providing the petri dish.