Right, Google's use of this whole field has been limited to optimizing existing products. As far as I know, after all their billions in investment, it hasn't driven the launch of a single new product. And the viscerally exciting stuff -- what we're calling "generative AI" these days -- never saw the light of day from inside Google in any form except arguably Gmail suggested replies and occasional sentence completion suggestions.

> it's a different mode of launching with higher risks, many of which have different risk profiles for Google-scale big tech than it does for OpenAI

This is textbook innovator's dilemma. I largely agree with the summary but think basically the whole job of Google's leadership boils down to two things: (1) keep the good times rolling, but (2) stay nimble and avoid getting disrupted by the next thing. And on the second point, they failed... or at least they're a lot closer to failure than they should be.

> Example: ChatGPT would tell you how to cook meth when it first came out, and people loved it. Google got a tiny fact about JWST semi-wrong in one tiny sub-bullet of a Bard example, got widely panned and lost $100B+ in market value.

Common narrative but I think the real reason Google's market cap tanked at the Bard announcement is due to two other things: (1) they showed their hand, and it turns out they don't have a miraculous ChatGPT-killer up their sleeves after all, and (2) the cost structure of LLM-driven search results are much worse than classical search tech, so Google is going to be less profitable in that world.

Tech journalists love to freak out about everything, including LLM hallucinations, bias, toxic output, etc., because tech journalists get paid based on engagement -- but I absolutely don't believe that stuff actually matters, and OpenAI's success is proving it. Google's mistake was putting too much stock in the noise that tech journalists create.