IMO the biggest algorithmic advances made by Google such as the transformer have greatly pushed the field forward. The giant model's that will have similar variations released in the next 3 months actually aren't that important on a conceptual level except as a PoC.
While the transformer model is important that was 1 paper in an ocean they put out every year.
Also it’s one of the only papers they put out that falls completely outside what I put above. They released everything about it including the model code, pretrained weights, the techniques; and it took quite a while for the model to “catch on” while it was peer reviewed and reproduced by others.
