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In what way? They weren't the first search engine, or advertising on the web?

In terms of ai and OpenAI leapfrogged them

The question is what's going to be OpenAI's Adwords.

Yahoo, AOL, Alta Vista (others too) all were search engines on the web before Google's Sept 1998 existence.

Lycos, Metacrawler, Dogpile. The list goes on

Sure, but we are talking ai and the fact that google was first in this space.

The first in what? Not in search nor Generative AI.

Why would you think search. Google wasn't first for search. They were first for page rank

Google researchers invented the transformer

Who if not Google was the first in generative ai? They invented transformers and diffusion, the cornerstones of text and image generati, respectively.

They weren't the first to meaningfully commercialise either, though. That remains with OpenAI for both (GPT-3/ChatGPT and DALL-E 2).

if your birth year starts with 2, I can see why you might think that