He's a UI strategist, from a UI perspective some of these AI things are a mess.

But Google says that their mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. A technology that understands and generates human language, with all its idiosyncrasies and connotations, is probably pretty important to that mission. And OpenAI stole a march on Google in commercializing it.

Maybe they justifiably panicked a little because they were starting to miss the boat.

It's a fine line between running around with your head cut off, and entering terminal decline due to too little too late.