they did have a late start in terms of productionizing the models. It's definitely improved but there was a time where Gemini and the associated tools werent as good as claude/oai

Is this true now?

The models are better, the integrations are now in your email, search, youtube, docs, spreadsheets, slides, Gemini is now higher than ChatGPT in the App Stores

I think you are right with the timeline being Google was infinitely ahead in the beginning, did nothing, then fell behind, but right now, they feel ahead -- established even, and distributing AI into all their products

I’ll concede it’s my impression not any facts, but when I talk to non-tech users they tend to hate the ai being embedded in all of their apps. I think the ai google search results are at best polarizing.

For technical users it’s very rare to hear people picking Gemini for general use cases unless they are required to for other reasons.

Google models do seem to get used a lot for specialized tasks though.