Execution is more important than being the first. MS and OpenAI did an excellent move, and now Google needs catch up. It doesn’t matter if they invented the model architecture used by ChatGPT, they are not the ones capitalizing it.

Case in point, 2017 Google Brain released the "Attention Is All You Need" paper however haven't done anything proactively to deliver it to mass users like OpenAI have done (among others) - perhaps this is the kick that Google needs to remind them that research alone isn't enough, it needs practical applications and the question could be whether Pichai is the right CEO to deliver that

Not sure I buy that.

They're clearly ignoring the already existing human-race scale negative impact of their do-anything-to-capture-peoples-attention advertising business.

etc.

history is littered with the dominant player getting shellacked by an upstart

And it usually is for political reasons not technical reasons.

Bard is a piece of shit. It's probably being held back so that it doesn't compete internally with google search

This pattern plays out all the time in the tech industry. You think google didn't know how to make a website like facebook? Of course, but they couldn't beat a much smaller weaker opponent even then. Google now is about 8 times larger than Google 2011 and much slower.