My hunch is that, aside from "safety" reasons, the Google Books lawsuit left some copyright wounds that Google did not want to reopen.
As of a couple weeks ago (the last time I checked) if you are signed in to multiple Google accounts and you cannot accept the non-commercial terms for one of them for AI Studio, the site is horribly broken (the text showing which account they’re asking you to agree to the terms for is blurred, and you can’t switch accounts without agreeing first).
In Google’s very slight defense, Anthropic hasn’t even tried to make a proper sign in system.
Like, kind of unreasonably good. You’d expect some perfunctory Electronic app that just barely wraps the website. But no, you get something that feels incredibly polished…more so than a lot of recent apps from Apple…and has powerful integrations into other apps, including text editors and terminals.
Gemini 1.0 was strictly worse than GPT-3.5 and was unusable due to "safety" features.
Google followed that up with 1.5 which was still worse than GPT-3.5 and unbelievably far behind GPT-4. At this same time Google had their "black nazi" scandals.
With Gemini 2.0 finally had a model that was at least useful for OCR and with their fash series a model that, while not up to par in capabilities, was sufficiently inexpensive that it found uses.
Only with Gemini-2.5 did Google catch up with SoTA. It was within "spitting distance" of the leading models.
Google did indeed drop the ball, very, very badly.
I suspect that Sergey coming back helped immensely, somehow. I suspect that he was able to tame some of the more dysfunctional elements of Google, at least for a time.
Unfortunate typo.
To be fair, for my use case (apart from GitHub copilot stuff with Claude 4.5 sonnet) I've never noticed too big of a difference between the actual models, and am more inclined to judge them by their ancillary services and speed, which google excells in.