In early 2023, months after the launch of OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT, Google was gearing up to launch its competitor to the model that underpinned the chatbot.
The search group had been testing generative AI software internally for several months by then. But as the company rallied its resources, multiple competing models emerged from different divisions within Google, vying for internal attention.
None was considered good enough to launch as the singular competitor to OpenAI’s model, known as GPT-4. The company was forced to postpone its plans while it tried to sort through the scramble of research projects. Meanwhile, it pushed out a chatbot, Bard, that was widely viewed to be far less sophisticated than ChatGPT.