They "lost from a position of strength" in that they had they had the most public-cloud like data centers and started thinking about selling that later than they should have. Bard/Gemini started later than chatgpt , but there's not really a moat for this LLM stuff, and Google started moving a lot earlier relative to GCP vs Amazon.

They've got the cash, the people, and the infrastructure to do things faster than the others going forward, which is a much bigger deal IMO than having millions more users right now. Most people still aren't using LLMs that often, switching is easy, and Google has the most obvious entry points with billion+ users with google.com, YouTube, gmail, chrome, android, etc.