Google's AI race: A two-year run of crisis and chaos, recapped

Although Google was the first to develop the transformer architecture that underpins modern large language models, it was OpenAI who raised the bar and ushered in a new era with ChatGPT. Google has since been on their back foot with an internal code red, with an intense two-year period of restructuring, layoffs, and rapid AI development work.

When ChatGPT landed in late 2022, everything changed. Google, the giant who invented the tech that paved the way for ChatGPT, is now trailing behind. Wired just published a great article detailing how Google was caught off guard and has been trying to claw back into the lead—or at least recover some lost ground—in the years since then.

Led by Sissie Hsiao, Google’s AI team was tasked with building a ChatGPT competitor in 100 days. The result was Bard, brought forward by the work of thousands of employees, scaled-down security checks, and long hours. Meanwhile, Google’s Brain and Deepmind AI units were merged, and that collaboration would result in Gemini, the language modeling project that helped salvage the company’s reputation.

But the road back to the top of AI has been bumpy. Bard made embarrassing mistakes, Google’s AI search feature gave inaccurate (and sometimes dangerous) advice, and the company’s image generator caused a media frenzy after generating historically inaccurate images.

Despite the setbacks, Google has regained some ground. Gemini launched in late 2023 and beat ChatGPT in several tests. The AI assistant is now being integrated across the Google ecosystem—from Gmail to Google Maps—and efforts at “agentic AI” are now underway.

But there’s still much to prove. The AI initiative is expensive, energy-intensive, and taking place at a time when Google is at risk of losing significant search advertising revenue due to ongoing antitrust litigation. Internally, many worry about the pace, the workload, and whether this is really Google’s second chance… or the start of something else.