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.

Google has been making innovations tho, it’s just in the AI space Google has been very conservative in public usage/interactions because the ethics, laws, and use in that space is very vague and has huge potential for serious damage to googles brand as well as the future of AI. For example Googles internal use of AI has been very impressive and unique, like RankBrain, BERT, MUM, neural matching, not to mention how AI/ML is leveraged in almost everyone of their projects especially in non-generative spaces like earthquake detection or disease prevention.

ChatGPT has been super cool but rn there’s a lot of hype surrounding it, we’re still very early stages AI development, and who knows how well it will age (especially with how it’s common for chat focused models to output bad info, we haven’t seen the real impact of that and how it will shift perceptions of AI).