Is Google significantly behind? I would say from a technological perspective, they're very closely trailing or even surpassing OpenAI in many ways; they've built a formidable ChatGPT competitor in Gemini—not to mention they have a huge home court advantage with billions of people on Search, Chrome, Android, and G Suite. If you zoom out a bit, it's not really a fair fight between the two. More likely, Apple and Microsoft win against Google because they use/buy OpenAI.

Technical chops has never been Google's problem. Gemini for all the hype Google has thrown at it, has continued the recurring trend of G not knowing how to win with their product launches.

When you push either model to its limits, yes, Google is pretty far behind GPT-4 with Gemini.

Because their weakness is in focus and execution, not resources.

If they focused all of their energy on, simply, a frontier AI model, and not trying to shoehorn a half-complete model into all of their products, there is no doubt they would be ahead.

But this is the innovator's dilemma, and why it is that startups are the disruptors.

Big companies move slow and lack focus. Small companies move fast and can only focus on one thing.

and politics, although they seem to have woken up (no pun intended) and started de-politicizing.

Because Google is huge. Presumably the same reason why Microsoft finds it easier to shovel billions into OpenAI instead of doing it in-house.

Wrong leadership at every level: Sundar as CEO, Prabhakar as Search SVP, Sissie as Assistant/Gemini VP. Maybe they should hire Ilya instead?

my guess is that a significantly underrated reason is that Google holds itself to stricter data compliance standards than OAI

That is openly laughable. Incognito mode claims, just one of a long list of examples of this politicized monopoly engaging in criminal behavior.

I don’t think that’s a fair take nor does it really disprove mine.

The compliance regime at big corps is definitely more sophisticated than at a player like OAI

Cynicism is just giving yourself an excuse to be wrong because it sounds cooler.

Google is ideologically compromised which ties them into knots and creates endless internal struggles.

this led to the release of Gemini which was absurdly biased when viewed by the typical American.

probably because they have identified (correctly) that slowly integrating AI into their existing products that make them hundreds of billions is smarter than just burning that money to get upvoted on HN. Tall trees catch too much wind, ancient Chinese proverb. If you can afford to being second is usually less painful than being first.

There are clear advantages and disadvantages to that approach, but assuming this is the correct choice ( seems plausible, but I am not automatically convinced ), is that the actual reason for being as behind as they are?

I would argue that is not the case. I won't re-list some of the reasons other posters mentioned, which, based on past year, appear more likely ( decisions hamstrung by corporate committees, data governance bureaucracy, and last, but not least, ideology focus ). Leadership that is actually focused on 'delivering value to the shareholder' or not being worried about first mover advantage seems only a part of it.

edit: added first mover wording