Jakob Uszkoreit, co-founder of biotech startup Inceptive, originally came up with the idea that paved the way for generative artificial intelligence. While working as a researcher at Google in 2017, Uszkoreit aimed to enhance the speed of training neural networks. He proposed a novel approach to data interpretation known as self-attention, which eventually led to the development of the transformer, a neural network architecture crucial to generative AI. In an interview with CNBC in June, Uszkoreit acknowledged that transformers had been utilized in practical applications at Google and other organizations long before, although not with as much attention.

He attributed OpenAI's ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, to bringing these applications into the spotlight. Uszkoreit and seven other Google researchers published the concept of transformers in their 2017 paper titled "Attention Is All You Need. " Since then, all eight authors have moved on from Google. Uszkoreit mentioned that smaller companies, such as OpenAI, might be bolder than Google in applying this technology to diverse products. He expressed gratitude for Google's contributions that we depend on in our everyday lives, even if the company's approach may be more cautious.