Netflix thought they had a similar moat of user-habits. But it turns out that the more important moat in the streaming market is a moat of content.
I really doubt that. If Google had anything that could seriously compete with GPT-4 they would be shouting about it from the mountains. Not publishing a comparison where they only include GPT-4 in the two benchmarks that they win.
If that is really the best that Google can do after working for several months on one-upping GPT-4, that's just sad, and doesn't bode well for them.
Deepmind has probably the best research in the AI area fundamentally, and the capabilities they have shown academically are much better than any other group. However, they have been seemingly completely disinterested in making any product usable for the public in the area - which takes a good deal of engineering and glue. So it will take a bit of time for them to make that happen. For example, OpenAI was not the first to use RLHF to train a language model (Sparrow from Deepmind was the first to conceive of this idea). Additionally, Deepmind has far better people in the general GNN and algorithmic reasoning area, which is going to shape up to be far more important in the coming years. That's of course not to say OpenAI doesn't have excellent research or people (Sutskyver is integral to an incredible number of monumental achievements in NNs), but the company as a whole focuses on product far more than fundamental academic research, and that has a potential to creep up on them.
Obviously Bard from the scientific side seems like it was probably hastily thrown together in an afternoon by one guy, and then sent to the marketing/we dev/etc group to put it public facing.
Good thing OpenAI has a distribution partner in Microsoft Azure, then.