2017, actually. But the search engine (supposedly the last innovation according to the previous comment) has seen most of its leaps forward in late 90s to early 2000s, which is a lot earlier.

Also it’s pretty hard to find a more clear example of Google sharing well done research than the white paper that started the current AI bubble. But they do publish a lot of stuff.

What about “Attention Is A You Need”, the white paper that kick-started the whole generative AI and LLM thing? OpenAI’s GPT models are built off of that architecture, like pretty much everything that came after it.

Like sure, modern Google is notoriously bad at building the actual end products, but it publishes a lot of research and some of it pushes others forward quite a lot.