Yea Google was caught off guard…but I feel it’s way to early to tell how this will play out. Googles been conservative from the beginning with AI for very good reasons this is very new almost bleeding edge technology, there is law still to be written on it, public hype is great and all but how long will the chatGPT hype last. How long before bad decisions, made on bad info from generative AI shift perceptions against how reliable these tools are. A big part of googles brand is reliability, quality, and accuracy as well as innovation. Microsoft doesn’t have much to lose by going fast and breaking things, in fact they very much have too otherwise Google would continue dominating the AI space.

If you look at how Google actually uses AI, not just one bad demo with Bard that was literally rolled out last minute, they have a deeply future focused approach. They haven’t lost much ground yet and their is no reason they need to chuck their current playbook out the window. The best thing would be to let chatGPT take most of the focus, learn from their pitfalls, and continue making progress in the background while still staying relevant. Which is pretty much what they’re doing.

I work for a competitor and it’s disconcerting seeing one of the FANGs trip up like this. They are such an ingrained part of our culture, have created amazing tech that I use everyday, and seeing them flustered like this on some thing that they should have down cold is concerning.

If one of them stagnates, they all eventually stagnate as well.