Google gets into the generative AI race. Again.

Meet Gemini. It’s Google’s new AI component for its Bard chatbot.

You’ll be forgiven for not knowing either of these names for Google’s artificial intelligence offerings. 

You haven’t heard of them because Google has lost the publicity war in this new generative AI race – where OpenAI and its now untouchable CEO Sam Altman are the poster figures.

Google is no longer seen as the most innovative tech firm – as it was for a good 15 years. In the past decade, the world has come to know Google as the big gorilla in the room, crushing any would-be competitors. 

At the start of its massive antitrust trial against Google this year, the US Justice Department said: “Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy start-up with an innovative way to search the emerging internet. That Google is long gone.”

Launching Gemini this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said it would be included in the Bard chatbot.

“These are the first models of the Gemini era and the first realisation of the vision we had when we formed Google DeepMind earlier this year,” he wrote. 

“This new era of models represents one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company. I’m genuinely excited for what’s ahead and for the opportunities Gemini will unlock for people everywhere.”

The rest of the internet world will show how excited they are – but the first week of December is hardly the best time to launch a new digital product. Does it show a sign of desperation to catch up to the ChatGPT hype machine?

The weird irony is that Google was arguably one of the most advanced in AI research. It has been researching this technology for a long time and had some of the smartest (human) minds working on it. Now, OpenAI is the clear winner – along with Microsoft, which has a 49% shareholder in OpenAI through its $13bn investment.

After ChatGPT surged to 1 million users within five days of its launch on 30 November 2022, Google’s management declared a “code red” late last year.

Gemini’s launch this week went far better than when it unveiled Bard in February when it replied to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope that it “took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system”.

Oops, that image was taken by Nasa 19 years before the telescope was even launched. The market wiped $100bn off Google’s valuation that day. Ouch.

Why didn’t Google launch its AI offerings sooner? That’s the rhetorical question everyone is asking. It didn’t, for several reasons including safety concerns, but the main one is that it didn’t have to. 

Google dominates in all the markets in which it operates: search, display advertising, selling display advertising, its Android operating system, its Chrome browser – which is the default on almost all Android phones – and has about 75% market share of the desktop/laptop browser market.

In short, Google is now a lazy monopoly. It didn’t launch its own AI offerings because it didn’t have to.

Why threaten its very lucrative and monopolistic business – which various lawsuits by the US government’s Department of Justice and FTA have filed, as have several US states – with an upstart technology that could disintermediate search?

Another consideration is the sheer cost of the computing power needed for AI chatbots to produce answers – known now by a new mangling of the English language as, simply, “compute”.

So, Google did what any good (read bad) monopoly does: it sat on new technology to protect its old technology. You can cut and paste the words ‘business model’ for ‘technology’ and we have a great demonstration of why the kings of one era are seldomly the kings of the next. DM