Until today, Google still has a defacto monopoly on search. Their secret sauce made them leader in the space and so far no other company has been able to come up with something better.
ChatGPT does not have any special secret sauce, Google can just build something better. So if I have to bet, long term, I will still bet on Google. That said, it is also not obvious that leadership at Google will be capable of delivering. That’s all different story.
Also, they have a platform running with 50 or 100 million users and all these people are feeding real-world data to improve the model.
They also have agility; also because they are not publicly-listed, they can take more reputational risk.
Regarding secret sauce, doing LLMs is easy now, as everything is open-source and documented.
Doing LLMs that works so well is very difficult and the secret sauce/tricks/dataset that were used to refine the model are not public.
Regarding Google Search organic, it's not that sure anymore, it was true before; but now it gets a bit painful to navigate among so much SEO spam.
Nowadays, Bing organic search results are great (less spammy in my observations), and if you compare Google Images and Yandex Images, then Google is not so shiny.
OpenAI has capital and revenue. The $20/month I’m paying them is a ridiculous no brainer - pays for itself in one work-related inference. One 30min session yesterday has me set up for the first half of my work week. It’s truly incredible.
>They just need a new CEO and to feel enough pressure to make it a company priority.
Sundar made machine learning a company priority years ago. Employees were encouraged to take machine learning courses, and much in the same way Google made everything "mobile first" in the early 2010s, I believe I remember hearing about them making everything "ML first" in the early late 2010s.
You can see their announcements at IO around their assistant which they presented as having the ability to call physical businesses, have a conversation with the person on the other ends, and book you an appointment/reservation.
And as recently as ChatGPT3, Sundar declared a "code red" to respond to it.
Google has been investing in this tech for a long time and it's been looking for ways to create products with it too. It's just that OpenAI leapfrogged them. I'm not saying they won't catch up, but they weren't caught flatfooted here.