[gabbagool]

To this day, I wonder if Google knew that they couldn't be the ones to unleash AI unto the world. They clearly had the wherewithal and expertise to do it (Vaswani et al, 2017), but were under so much antitrust pressure at the time that it seemed inconceivable that they could be the ones to introduce such a polarizing technology to the world. What kind of firestorm would have rained down on them if they were the first.

Or, you might think, if Google had the technology, and they knew how to turn it into a trillion-dollar product, it's beyond ridiculous to think they would just hand the win over to someone else.

[scottyah]

I think they just saw it as slop, they were working to make it more reliable and accurate. Releasing it first would tarnish their name, it just wasn't ready. OpenAI had no name to tarnish, so people were more willing to deal with the subpar experience as they refine it.