Are you discounting the work on AlphaGo, AlphaFold, etc.?
Google may be playing "catch up" in releasing these things as products, but remember that ChatGPT, etc. are all based on Google's paper on Transformers ("Attention is all you need").
How do you account for the apparent discrepancy between research and product? It's not like Google is low on resources when it comes to engineers or product managers. If ChatGPT owes so much to Google's research, then why is their product so far ahead?
Google may be playing "catch up" in releasing these things as products, but remember that ChatGPT, etc. are all based on Google's paper on Transformers ("Attention is all you need").