Look, either the follow-up article did pretraining or not. Jeff Dean is claiming that the importance of pretraining was mentioned 37 times and the follow-up didn't do it. That sounds easy to verify.

Likewise the importance of spending 20x as much money on the training portion seems easy to verify, and significant.

That they would fail to properly test against industry standard workbenches seems reasonable to me. This is a bunch of ML specialists who know nothing about chip design. Their background is beating everyone at Go and setting a new state of the art for protein folding, and not chip design. If you dismiss those particular past accomplishments as hyperbolic marketing, that's your decision. But you aren't going to find a lot of people in these parts who agree with you.

If you think that those were real, but that a bunch of more recent accomplishments are BS, I haven't been following closely enough to have an opinion. The stuff that crossed my radar since AlphaFold is mostly done at places like OpenAI, and not Google.

Regardless, the truth will out. And what Google is claiming for itself here really isn't all that impressive.