I personally believe these are marketing failures rather than technical failures.
I also personally loathe Microsoft, but even I will concede that they probably have the technical wherewithal to follow known trajectories, the cat is out of the bag with AI now.
It wasn't sufficient for Google+ or Farmville either, but both Google and Meta have extremely competitive LLMs. If Microsoft commit themselves (which is a big if), they could have a competitive AI research lab. They're a cloud company now though, so it makes sense that they'd align themselves with the most service-oriented business of the lot.
GPT-4 is a magnitude larger and not a magnitude better. Even before that, GPT-3 was not a particularly high watermark (compared to T5 and BERT) and GPT-2 was famously so expensive to run that it ran up a 6-figure monthly cloud spend just for inferencing. Lord knows what GPT-4 costs at-scale, but I'm not convinced it's cost-competitive with the alternatives.
GPT-4 is an existential threat to Google. Since March 24 of this year, 80% of the time I ask GPT-4 questions I would google before. And Google knows this. They are throwing billions at it but simply cannot catch up.
There are many versions of GPT-4 model that appeared after the first one. My point is that Google and others still cannot match the quality of the first one, more than a year after it was trained.
Probably. If the people running it and the shareholders were committed to keeping up and spending money to do so.