It took just under three years, but Google has finally caught up and overtaken its AI competitors.
You remember how it was. When OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of 2022 and created a world-wide sensation, Google was caught napping— and panicked. Despite the fact its researchers had introduced the architecture behind the new language models five years earlier, and despite having the now Nobel Prize-winning AI lab Deepmind in the corporate family, it was OpenAI, not Google, that developed the first widely usable model.
There’s a lot of rumor and speculation floating around about what it was like at Google at the time. CEO Sundar Pichai supposedly declared “Code Red” internally, something he later denied. Larry Page and Sergey Brin reportedly stepped back into the company in “founder mode.” Either way, Google reorganized and put Deepmind and its head, Demis Hassabis, in the driver’s seat to focus on the new large language models (LLMs).
