Google is a search engine company and LLMs and related technologies are basically an existential risk to their core business -- ads in search. Anything they do to improve AI has a potential to kill their golden goose. Like imagine they actually do produce a breakthrough LLM but don't know how to monetize it yet and traffic to google search craters.
If you're the best horse and buggy company in the world, do you go all in on building cars or just keep doing what you're good at and extract profits while you still can? I don't think the right answer is obvious -- just like it's not at all obvious that ICE car companies should pivot to electric, and they've been pretty bad at electric cars for the same reasons.
ChatGPT has replaced maybe 1/2 of my Google searches and the cognitive relief from not having to wade through crap websites and ads is immense. The other 1/2 I'm slowly transitioning to Kagi because search results are more reliable. I'm afraid Google's best days may be behind it.
* Complacent about their perceived lead
* Hesitant to disrupt their advertising money firehose in any way
* Additional reputational, legal, regulatory risk vs. upstart competitors
A) If Google is found liable for copyright on each thing trained, that's more than their net assets by thousands fold at the mandatory minimum rates.
B) If OpenAI is found liable, they go bankrupt and creditors don't even get their non-transferable 70% margin (to Microsoft) cloud credits from Microsoft's investment.
Once Google released Bard though there is pretty much no excuse not to put out better stuff, they already made a legal determination that it is iron-clad fair use.
It is absolutely this.
Looking at the speed with which they rolled out Bard, are developing Gemini, building features into various products -- I see zero complacency and zero hesitancy.
But they are focused on doing it reliably and safely and not getting sued. These things just take longer.
Now that a shock to the system is here, the management lacks the vision or long term planning to have any idea what to do about it.
I don't doubt that there's plenty of engineering talent left at Google. Under the right leadership they could be leveraging their unmatched assets to create the most capable AIs that exist. Under the current leadership, that's just not going to happen. Expect nothing more from Google under their current regime.
YMMV.