Let’s see. OpenAI acquired 100 million users and was the fasted growth in history, partners with Google’s biggest competitor Microsoft. They have since integrated ChatGPT into Bing and announced a raft of new products. Amazon has launched their competitors as well. Tons of other companies are throwing their hats in the ring too, but their big cloud competitors (the platform of platforms) are already launched and looking competitive.
Google, on the other hand, was late to introduce a product competitive to ChatGPT and mostly fumbled the announcement when it did.
Google is coming from behind in their execution after being outmaneuvered by OpenAI and a very weak early showing with Bard.
Google didn’t deliver a chat-powered generative A.I. product despite working on one for years. They just didn’t have the risk taking culture where releasing it into the wild imperfectly was something Google was willing to do. This was a profound misstep, and dethroned them. At one point they had the largest and most talented assembly of AI researchers in the world and virtually unlimited research budgets, but they didn’t ship.
This puts them in a position where they have something to prove. To investors. To developers. To cloud customers. And to themselves.
Their entire business is about being a trusted place for people to find information, and they didn’t feel they were ready, and then they missed the boat.
It's the reason, when it finally rushed a product out the door, *they called it Bard.* They didn't call it Google AI.
They talked AI up to the point of ridiculousness at I/O. Two words they drove home in every talk: responsible and helpful.
This is why they need to establish a position of leadership and avoid weak delivery like this labs launch (maybe it’s not a launch, maybe it just needs to be relaunched — I’m making an assumption). Because it’s not super on point in delivering their brand promise for AI or even explaining what it is in a clear way.
People can’t even tell what it is, not a gigantic corporate delivering early stage experiments at the cutting edge of helpful and responsible AI.
I’m open to being wrong about any of this, but this is how I generally see it.