From what I see in that GPT 3 and 4 was a bit of a rugpull for the industry, now we're all laughing at Google because seemingly they had their hands on the rug for nearly a decade and did nothing - but from the other perspective, maybe they saw the future openai has now brought us and decided against being the pioneers
Amazingly enough, I think this is a bit of it. Some powerful enough people at Google became concerned about implications, including around "hallucinations", "poisoning", etc., and decided to put this sort of research on something of a backburner - justified, in part, by a lack of some obvious easy interfacing of this with search (scaling, hallucinations, etc.).
Of course, the 'wonderful' thing about humans / "independent agents with survival drives in competitive game-theoretic type scenarios" is: if enough people / "agents" have access / opportunity, someone WILL "push the button".
It's just delicious ... the same kinds of patterns over and over - "oh, we should really do something about X / nobody should have power like X, ... but, there's no stopping it, ... oh well".
And, the "rules" really are subtly, many levels down, in place, to make it apparently impossible to not get trapped, one way or another.
(Anyway... [Cartman voice] Screw you guys, I'm going to my other planet...)
Probably safety-driven terror. They really really want to get their bots going, but in every single meeting some PM or other concerned engineer talks about safety and f**s up the entire meeting.
They even made the bot not respond to arithmetics questions because the bot is bad at this, lol. Someone who knows how to modify the bot had actually spent their time on something as unimportant as that.
Bard being bad at anything else doesn't seem to stop it. It hallucinates at the drop of the hat. Asking it almost any question implying X nonexistent thing exists causes it to make that thing up.