For a second there, Google looked like it would fall behind.
It was OpenAI that released the first consumer-facing, generative-A.I.-powered chatbot last fall—despite how Google’s artificial intelligence team had long been “the envy of the tech community,” as my colleague Jeremy Kahn details in the latest Fortune cover story. In 2017, it was Google researchers who came up with the basic algorithmic design—an artificial neural network called a transformer—that would end up underpinning the generative A.I. boom. And in 2021, Google had created LaMDA, a chatbot with impressive dialogue skills, though the company had feared that releasing it would risk its reputation if it produced responses that were inaccurate or biased or “just be bizarre and disturbing,” Kahn writes.
