alt Hacker NewsYeah, for all that people make fun of the "Open" in the name their API-first strategy really did make this stuff available to a ton of people. They were the first organization to allow almost anyone to start actively experimenting with what LLMs could do and it had a huge impact.
DeepMind wrote the paper, and while Google's API arrived later than OpenAI's it isn't as late as some people think. The PaLM API was released before the Gemini brand was launched.
Microsoft funded OpenAI and popularized early LLMs a lot with Copilot, which used OpenAI but now supports several backends, and they're working on their own frontier models now.