However, whatever's going on inside I still strongly believe in that company! Sometimes though it just feels like they don't themselves.
I'd prioritize their problems like this:
1. LLM's don't have a lucrative business model that Google needs.
2. The quality of their language model is really lacking as of now.
You fix 1 and 2, ChatGPT's branding is nothing. Google is the biggest advertisement machine in the world and they can market the hell out of their product. Just see how Chrome gained ground on Firefox for example.
Google is still used several folds more than ChatGPT and if you resolve 1 and 2, Google will make their money and their users have no incentive to go to ChatGPT.
Many markets had early leaders who got stomped by later entrants.
Microsoft and Google both have the capability and trust to make this available. When corporates start paying for LLMs, per user, or for applications, both Google and Microsoft and the two companies are in the best position.
All other industries will be users paying for LLMS model access.
And yet Google is the largest online advertiser in the world. And yet, GMail used to (I don't know if it still does) push ads into people's inboxes.
I have as much belief in their PII controls as in their "Don't be evil" motto.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
When you open Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to show you the most useful and relevant ads. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated. These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.
...
To opt-out of the use of personal information for personalized Gmail ads, go to the Ads Settings page
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They literally train their datasets on people's personal data.
Despite what people often write and believe here, the access controls on PII data at Google are incredibly strict. You can't just arbitrarily train on people's personal data. I know, because when I was there, working on search backend data mining, in order to get access to anonymized search and web logs, I had to sign paperwork that essentially said I'd be taken to the cleaners if I abused the access.
> What gives, Google? Get on it
It's a very difficult decision to intentionally destabilize the space you are the leader in, for all the reasons you can imagine. In a sense, Google needed someone else with nothing to lose to shake up the space. How they execute in the new reality is yet to be seen. The biggest challenge they may have right now isn't technological, but that "ChatGPT" has become a sort of brand, like Kleenex and well, Google.