google was leading on LLM, Search just (correctly) didn't want to tarnish their good name with the disaster that putting matrix-multiplied text generation on it would case.
in a sense, google solved this by trashing it's own reputation, so it's not actually a "net" problem that it spews garbage on the result page now.
I don't think that's quite correct. I have my screenshot from years back when google was "correcting" your query so I asked google what year Marilyn Munroe shot JFK and it said 1962. I'm reasonably sure this is before the transformers paper.