He didn't say they were not doing transformers research. In fact, he specifically mentioned a type of transformer they were working on. And labs like Qwen and DeepSeek (at least) have shown how incredible results can be when you innovate in the area of LLMs.

I think the real point of the post is that office politics and poor management got in the way of innovation due to infighting and poor execution in transfer of technology from research to product.