I don't think they are behind just because they have released less stuff. They had LaMDA way before ChatGPT, and they had multimodal models (both by DeepMind and by Google Brain) well before OpenAI.
If you ask a googler about this, they typically assume GPT is just as stupid as bard. Or say something like "so GPT is just trained on more data - we can do that." As if nothing's wrong.
> We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback. [1]
> Bard is powered by a research large language model (LLM), specifically a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA, and will be updated with newer, more capable models over time. [2]
[1] https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-upda...
Is it only me that sees a problem here?