The reality, as usual, is that Google is far, far ahead of the other companies. Just like Waymo is ahead of Tesla, and DeepMind is ahead of OpenAI by miles...:
They even have a far more advanced language model, they just don't release it publicly. It's scary how far Google is ahead, with its army of Ph. D's. They're the ones that pioneered the papers and techniques that OpenAI used -- but they did it 5 years ago.
This is just Google being Google ... they sunsetted Reader when it was popular, went through like 20 different chat products (GMail Chat, Hangouts, Google Meet, etc. etc.) and cannibalized their own projects. But as far as technology, they've got AI they're not disclosing to the world yet.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or not, but I'm going to assume serious and write a serious response.
Having PhDs or doing research does not equal the ability to create products people want to use and/or pay for. History has shown us time and time again there are some people who are amazing at creating original and groundbreaking research and other people who are amazing at turning research into money making, people-pleasing products. See all the research that came out of Xerox PARC which ended up doing nothing for Xerox and everything for Apple (and other companies).
Google has been spending a fortune on research in AI for 15+ years and, if anything, the company's main product (Search) has only gotten worse! They have been second, third best, or moribund in mobile phones, cloud computing, videogames, social media, and many others I've forgotten.
Now I'm not sure what the moral of the story here is but I can say it definitely isn't that doing the most research equals success because it clearly isn't that! I'd say it's probably a culture issue and also a motivation issue (which are clearly related). You're sitting on a money printing machine, employees all earning 350k+ per year, in an office filled with bean-bags, gourmet food, and living a chill life with nice and comfortable working hours... where is the motivation and drive to try and build a really innovative and amazing new product? "Sounds like a lot of work man..." It surprises me little that OpenAI beat them to the punch.
Even if those benchmarks showing their models are X% above SoTA actually translate into qualitatively significant improvements (which they probably would), Google still has the most to lose even if they do release widely and little to gain. Their best case outcome is to not lose any users, and maybe gain back a few % of the users they've lost in recent years. Search result quality has been declining noticeably for a while now and users want something different.
I’m bearish on Google but you’re correct and shouldn’t be in light gray text. Bard is a smaller version of Lamda, not PALM, so we know for sure they had a much more advanced model some time ago
If google can’t get things out of the lab into products that accrue value to their business they’ll head the way of Xerox PARC. A legacy of research innovations that others successfully capitalized on.
For many that may be a laudable end goal. For shareholders though it’s probably a tough pill to swallow.
Innovators dilemma. Search has huge margins because it is cheap to run. LLMs are not. Google gets 80% of revenue from search, Microsoft is forcing them to put a dent in those margins and laughing their asses off. Or as Nadella said in an interview “we made Google dance”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QEDBEdL7HY
They even have a far more advanced language model, they just don't release it publicly. It's scary how far Google is ahead, with its army of Ph. D's. They're the ones that pioneered the papers and techniques that OpenAI used -- but they did it 5 years ago.
This is just Google being Google ... they sunsetted Reader when it was popular, went through like 20 different chat products (GMail Chat, Hangouts, Google Meet, etc. etc.) and cannibalized their own projects. But as far as technology, they've got AI they're not disclosing to the world yet.