Google has far better models than llama based models. They just simply don't put them facing the public.

It is pretty ridiculous that they essentially just set a marketing team with no programming experience to write Bard, but that shouldn't fool anyone into believing they don't have capable models in Google.

If Deepmind were to actually provide what they have in some usable form, it would likely be quite good. Despite being the first to publish on RLHF (just right before OpenAI) and bring the idea to the academic sphere, they mostly work in areas tangential to 'just chatbots' (e.g. how to improve science with novel GNNs, etc). However, they're mostly academics, so they aren't set on making products, doing the janitorial work of fancy UIs and web marketing, and making things easy to use, like much of the rest of the field.