AI’s Scientific Ethos and the Moat That Wouldn’t Hold
Google may have built the foundation of the modern AI economy—and then published the instructions.
In 2017, eight researchers across Google’s Brain and Research divisions released a paper titled “Attention Is All You Need.” What followed is now familiar: a technological inflection point, rapid diffusion, and an explosion of competitors building on the same core idea. Less appreciated is the mechanism behind it. This is not just a story about a breakthrough. It is a story about why that breakthrough did not—and perhaps could not—remain proprietary.
That dynamic is the focus of this post. The norms that govern AI research—what I will call the “scientific ethos”—systematically undermine any single firm’s ability to hoard knowledge for long. The transformer is the clearest example.