How do you sell ads on an AGI product? Since they made their original mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") subservient to their ads business, they didn't have an incentive to build it. It's the old innovator's dilemma. AI makes their business model obsolete, so they couldn't imagine how to build it.

You cannot get someone to build what their carrier / status depends on not being built.

Bard seems hobbled because Google can't conceive of anyone not referring back to Google Search as the ultimate arbiter of truth.

How? By product placement. Steer the answers towards certain solutions. Ad people will be bidding on keywords it prompts. It's yet to be seen how much different that will be from normal keywords in search.

I think it's trickier than that. People wouldn't trust the answers. At least with ads, you can see that it's an ad. And it seems like there would be liability issues to having your AI saying "Use X product because..." vs passively displaying an ad. And since LLMs are non-deterministic, you'd have the risk that it says something that the advertiser wouldn't want. Advertisers would probably be scared of that. I think OpenAI's plugins look like a better fit. Just tell the model what you want and it interacts with services directly. I assume OpenAI is getting a cut of that?

Make an AGI powerful enough that if you tell it to book you a holiday or buy you a bicycle it finds something better than you'd have got yourself, and at a better price too.

They have DeepMind which has produced some incredibly impressive toys in its own right. We can't say right now that superhuman gameplaying performance by self-taught machines is less of a step to AGI than completing text prompts. Quite possibly both will be blind alleys along the way. But OpenAI's thing has many more commercial applications right now.