I almost feel bad for Google here. They were WAY AHEAD of the AI game for years. Then they put it on the back burner JUST when it was the absolute wrong time to do so.
So when they came out with Gemini and other ChatGPT style tools they were a good year+ behind the OpenAI and Anthropic – and of course everybody lagged behind China already they just didn’t know it yet.
From a consumer POV a lot of it has been a hard sell for all of the companies because they’re “trying too hard in some areas”.
For example, Microsoft. Microsoft, like Google, should have been years ahead of everybody else because they WERE.
But Microsoft had a teenage boys’ mentality for AI and their offerings were all the “female white sexy robot who will do your bidding”, which has already been a grossly out of touch AI model for decades, and they also lacked the “moral guard rails” in other areas in their many large language model experiments with AI. [a few disasters of theirs comes to mind esp on Twitter years ago].
OpenAI’s genius was building in a “Human Resources” sensibility. You can sense a virtual “administrator’s office” at a school scouring over the output to see if it’s acceptable for their teachers and students or HR department at a large business or a government ethics department double checking whether they’d want to output this or that.
This allowed chatGPT 3 (or whatever they released in Dec 2022) and beyond to “feel” very polished and safe.
[oh and for the “trying to hard” in some areas, a point I forgot to get to, a lot of people have been unhappy with Google inserting gemini results on top of searches, Facebook inserting AI summaries and Microsoft REBRANDING OFFICE, calling it “CoPilot 365” and sliding in a CoPilot sidebar, offering to rewrite everything you want to write, hoping you’ll take the bait. These efforts smell desperate at the moment, although usage may prove it wise]
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