TL;DR: Google invented the Transformer, but OpenAI won the future. Why? Because Google operated on Logic, while OpenAI operated on Instinct. Sergey Brin’s recent confession at Stanford reveals a painful truth: Google had all the data, all the scientists, and all the "proof" that LLMs were flawed. What they lacked was the "Vibe"—the uniquely human ability to sense a revolution before the metrics can prove it exists.
I am James, CEO of Mercury Technology Solutions.
Sergey Brin recently admitted what everyone in the Valley already knew: Google "messed up." They invented the Transformer architecture in 2017, yet they let OpenAI define the era.
History will look back at this as the ultimate case study in The Limits of Logic.
Google is a company built on data. If you cannot measure it, it doesn't exist. If it hallucinates 5% of the time, it is broken. But in the dawn of the AI age, this obsession with precision became their cage. They missed the future because they were looking at the benchmarks, while OpenAI was looking at the feeling.
1. Logic Looks Backward; Instinct Looks Forward
Eight years ago, when the Transformer paper dropped, the "rational" view was clear:
- It’s just another architecture.
- It’s a slightly better Bi-LSTM.
- It’s good for classification, but too expensive for generation.
I remember this era well. In 2019, I used BERT for legal tech. It was efficient. It was SOTA (State of the Art). Logic dictated that we should keep optimizing these specific use cases.
But there is a "Vibe" that data cannot capture. When OpenAI started scaling GPT, the "science" didn't fully support it. There was no guarantee that throwing massive compute at the problem would result in reasoning capabilities. It was a gamble. It was an Instinctual Bet made by people like Ilya Sutskever who didn't just calculate the math—they sensed the trajectory.
Google looked at the current reality (it makes mistakes). OpenAI sensed the future reality (it will learn).
2. The LaMDA Moment: Killing the Magic
The contrast became undeniable in June 2022. Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed the internal model LaMDA was "sentient."
- Google's Reaction (Logic): This is a PR disaster. The model is just predicting text. It is hallucinating. Fire the engineer. Shut it down.
- The World's Reaction (Sensation): Holy sht. If a Google engineer thinks it's alive, how powerful is this thing?*
Google saw a bug. The world saw magic. Because Google was terrified of "social pressure" and "inaccuracy," they suppressed the very technology that generated awe. They killed the Vibe to protect the Brand. Six months later, ChatGPT launched with that exact same "hallucinating" magic, and the world embraced it because of its human-like flaws, not in spite of them.
3. The "Human Vibe" is the Alpha
Brin admitted they were "too timid." They were afraid of the model saying "dumb things."
This reveals the blind spot of the Engineer mindset. We think value comes from Precision. But in the consumer market, value comes from Resonance.
A room full of PhDs will talk themselves out of a revolutionary idea because they can prove why it won't work. A visionary leader will pursue it simply because they feel it will work.
Conclusion: Trust Your Sensors
The lesson here isn't that Google isn't smart. It's that they were too smart. They analyzed the soul out of the machine.
As we move deeper into 2026, the most valuable asset for a CEO or a Founder is no longer just technical literacy. Everyone has access to the same models now. The differentiator is Sensory Intuition.
- Can you feel the market shift before the graph shows it?
- Can you sense the "Humanity" in a product even when the engineers say it's flawed?
Google had the invention. But they lacked the Instinct. And in the game of changing the world, Vibe checks don't lie.
Mercury Technology Solutions: Accelerate Digitality.
