2017, seven Google employees invent the transformer architecture and publish a paper. Google's investing heavily into ML, with their own custom 'TPU' chips and their 'Tensorflow' ML framework.
2019ish, Google has an internal chatbot they decide to do absolutely nothing with. Some idiot tells the press it's sentient, and they fire him.
2022, ChatGPT launches. It proves really powerful, a product loads of individuals and businesses are ready to pay for, and the value of the company skyrockets.
2023, none of the seven Transformer paper authors are at Google any more. Google rushes out Bard. Turns out they don't have a sentient super-intelligence after all. In fact it's badly received enough they end up needing to rebrand it a few months later.
Classic tortoise-and-hare situation - Google spent 5 years napping, then had to sprint flat out just to take third place.
Have you ever listened to what Lemoine said? Sure, we have no proof and he's under NDA so probably no documentation that can be scrutinized. But still, his alleged chats were chilling in some ways. They probably didn't except him to go public and so they had to spend years nerfing their chat bot before launching it as a product and that's why it sucks: They're too careful and have too much to lose in bonuses. Google will probably lose some market share over the next few years before they're getting nervous to put someone with a longer leash into the CEO seat.
I recall this particular person seeming like a bit of a crackpot on internal forms before (and for reasons unrelated to) the Lamda chatbot. I didn't know him personally and don't even remember the details anymore but it made an impression that wasn't dispelled by his reaction to a new model passing the turing test.
For the tortoise to win in technology it needs to be dedicated to relentlessly polishing and improving something over a long period to make the best product experience. Those aren't traits I particularly associate with Google unfortunately.
It is easier to judge revenue or market share than technical quality of the models itself objectively , they are relatively close to each other functionally .
In the market, I would say both Anthropic and openAI have been able to do that much better than traditional big tech including Google.
OpenAI is the market leader by far with the most name recognition. Google was the last to market. Its initial release of Gemini was a total flop because of the meme "Use elmer's glue on pizza to keep the cheese on". It has finally become more consistent, and it manages to compete with other models though I never see anyone recommending Gemini first.
All of these companies are in the red, but OpenAI has the most revenue.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I don't think OpenAI's brand is all that durable. You can see that Perplexity.AI has been gaining rapidly. At this point they have half as much search traffic as OpenAI:
2017, seven Google employees invent the transformer architecture and publish a paper. Google's investing heavily into ML, with their own custom 'TPU' chips and their 'Tensorflow' ML framework.
2019ish, Google has an internal chatbot they decide to do absolutely nothing with. Some idiot tells the press it's sentient, and they fire him.
2022, ChatGPT launches. It proves really powerful, a product loads of individuals and businesses are ready to pay for, and the value of the company skyrockets.
2023, none of the seven Transformer paper authors are at Google any more. Google rushes out Bard. Turns out they don't have a sentient super-intelligence after all. In fact it's badly received enough they end up needing to rebrand it a few months later.
Classic tortoise-and-hare situation - Google spent 5 years napping, then had to sprint flat out just to take third place.