I am not convinced that ChatGPT is all that much of a threat to Google. Exactly how difficult would it be for Google to reproduce ChatGPT? They have access to all the training data and crawl it regularly. They have the infrastructure in place to make the model and integrate it into search. What am I missing here?

Unless OpenAI has some IP they cannot use it would seem that they have done Google a favor by demonstrating the potential of the technology. If my memory is correct one cannot patent an algorithm.