Comment by michaelt
What Google did was sit on their ass, not deigning to release anything. In the meantime, OpenAI became a $150 billion company. And Anthropic came out with Claude, and Facebook with Llama, and Mistral with their models.
Only then did Google realise there might be something to this LLM stuff - so they responded with Bard, a product so poorly received they later had to completely rebrand it. Looks like they didn't have a "sentient" model up their sleeve after all. Then the updated, rebranded model had a bunch of image generation embarrassments of its own.
Admittedly, they have recovered somewhat since then; they're second on some performance leaderboards, which is respectable.
But there was a real tortoise-and-hare situation where they thought they were so far ahead they had time for a nap, until they got overtaken. Any lead they had from inventing transformers and being the only people with TPUs has been squandered.
I have the impression they regarded generative AI as too dangerous. Before the success of ChatGPT, they never considered making PaLM or LaMDA or Chinchilla or Imagen publicly available until they saw themselves in a competitive disadvantage.