It seems you didn't quite hear the argument. I agree with you that the models Google has released to the public are absolutely worthless. That certainly does not mean they don't have extremely performant models at all however.
If you actually have worked in the area of NLP for about 10 years, you would recognize how the work from Deepmind is much more novel and innovative than other groups. OpenAI certainly has great public facing services, and Meta should be congratulated for releasing these models (although I would still prefer the Galactica training data), but academically Deepmind is one of the best groups around.
> but academically Deepmind is one of the best groups around
I think your argument is basically that Google has the potential to create the best models because of superiority in the theory of LLMs, even though we hear of no signs from the board, the ceo, or beta releases or product showcases.
But let’s say you’re right. When do you think we would experience the supremacy of DeepMind in our daily lives?
Surely Google can find another team of code monkeys to whip out a frontend if there is money to be made.
I don't think Google is going to pull back from making some more money.
I think the most likely option is that they have a bunch of talented academics who get paid on time to work on what interest them - but they're the stereotypical large inefficient company and they can't coordinate the effort of productionizing some cool models before the competition.
If you actually have worked in the area of NLP for about 10 years, you would recognize how the work from Deepmind is much more novel and innovative than other groups. OpenAI certainly has great public facing services, and Meta should be congratulated for releasing these models (although I would still prefer the Galactica training data), but academically Deepmind is one of the best groups around.