Nice try Sundar!
If you want to believe that Google is intentionally holding it back and, as a diversion, releasing a very buggy software to the public, then why not, but it doesn't make sense at all.
Even in terms of costs, they could force a limit of X messages and then push to upgrade to a paid subscription.
In terms of reputation or safety they have DeepMind as a separate entity.
This is like claiming that Tesla has a revolutionary car, but that Tesla is intentionally not releasing it, and instead waiting that someone else does.
As a fictitious and parallel example: it's not because Xerox invented the mouse that it is a great company for innovation or that they wouldn't get eaten by others.
(site-note: some claims Xerox didn't even invent the mouse).
Regarding transformers:
The transformers guys ("Attention Is All You Need") don't appear to work for Google for a long-time, and the comments from the team are not so glorious from what I see (if I remember well, the Character.AI is very harsh on Google all the time claiming it was not good for innovation).
They may be missing the RLHF part for example or other part of the magic, and between 2017 and 2023 is an insanely long period where many impactful new things have been discovered.
Doing the 90% is easy now with LLMs, but each % of improvement is very difficult.
One reason would be capacity. They've increased their server production at least 4x since the announcement of Bard, and that's recent enough that I feel like any decom and deployment, even if it's 1:1 to existing data centers, hasn't been completed.
This maps to your last point somewhat, since anticipation is hard. Google has learned not to fully open the all the taps since they can't commit to a consistent product. Assistant and Home technologies were heavily encumbered by patent defense, security awareness, and privacy controls, so much so that the product capabilities they advertised during the Pixel 3 launch were permanently rolled back. They're not promoting or promising anything about Bard, if you notice, because people may not appreciate every new feature, but they never forget when you take things away.
That being said, for all the other points I agree with you.
Google is often a target of any legal claim, so perhaps this makes them more risk-averse too.
Bard is no different. We'll all be performing the RLHF, and they'll sell off the improvements.
If we passed a law that made it illegal to work for free, companies like Google would be falling over themselves to institute UBI to avoid paying out to their userbases.
They keep slipping. One week ChatGPT, the next GPT4, the next Plugins, ...
Everyone is already going to be building on OpenAI by the time Google says it's ready.
Xerox, HP, and Bell Labs could have all said the same thing as you about having invented modern computing devices, and look what happened to them.
I'm pretty sure Google has an AI that is on par with ChatGPT. The reason they still need more time is because they are now fine-tuning the AI to include their paying partners' products into the response.
It is VERY easy to make ChatGPT lie on future questions by injecting the right prompts. That means it is equally easy to inject ads into ChatGPTs responses. And if Google can pull that off, it'll be even more profitable than tolerating SEO spam so that brands need to buy keyword ads for their own homepage.
As a mental model, I believe the future of Google will be a personal butler that answers all of your questions. The butler usually does a good job, so you trust him. But unknown to you, the user, your butler is being blackmailed and forced to lie to you on some days for some questions.