This is what many folks said about OpenAI when they appeared on the scene building on foundational work done at Google. But the real point here is not to assign arbitrary credit, it’s to ask how those big companies are going to recoup their infinite budgets when all they’re buying is a 6-12 month head start.
For-profit companies don't have to publish papers on the SOTA they product. In previous generations and other industries, it was common to keep some things locked away as company secrets.
But Google, OpenAI and Meta have chosen to let their teams mostly publish their innovations, because they've decided either to be terribly altruistic or that there's a financial benefit in their researchers getting timely credit for their science.
But that means then that anyone with access can read and adapt. They give up the moat for notariety.
And it's a fine comparison to look at how others have leapfrogged. Anthropic is similarly young—just 3 and a bit years old—but no one is accusing them of riding other companies' coat tails in the success of their current frontier models.
A final note that may not need saying is: it's also very difficult to make big tech small while maintaining capabilities. The engineering work they've done is impressive and a credit to the inginuity of their staff.
Anthropic was founded in part from OpenAI alumni, so to some extent it’s true for them too. And it’s still taken them over 3 years to get to this point.
