I wonder what happened at Google. They basically invented Transformers, and had useful LLMs for a while. Bert, Lambda, Palm, Sparrow were all cutting edge.
Why didn't they ship something like ChatGPT earlier? Lack of product vision? Perfectionism?
Is this Xerox vs Apple all over again ?
They made T5 and released the weights, while T5 "only" goes up to 11B params, it's an efficient model for a wide variety of tasks and the base for a lot of other models/projects. Of note imagen[1] and open-assistant[2] use T5 and FlanT5.