[paul7986]

Yahoo, AOL, Alta Vista (others too) all were search engines on the web before Google's Sept 1998 existence.

[locusofself]

Lycos, Metacrawler, Dogpile. The list goes on

[ipaddr]

Sure, but we are talking ai and the fact that google was first in this space.

[paul7986]

The first in what? Not in search nor Generative AI.

[ipaddr]

Why would you think search. Google wasn't first for search. They were first for page rank

Google researchers invented the transformer

[kettleballroll]

Who if not Google was the first in generative ai? They invented transformers and diffusion, the cornerstones of text and image generati, respectively.

[Philpax]

They weren't the first to meaningfully commercialise either, though. That remains with OpenAI for both (GPT-3/ChatGPT and DALL-E 2).