Google is winning the AI race

Google had all the pieces needed to lead the AI revolution. It had the talent and knowledge — after all, the Transformer model, the foundation of today’s large language models, was created inside Google’s research labs. It had access to nearly the entire internet’s information, across text, video, and audio. And it had access to the required computing power to crunch through massive training runs at scale.

Yet despite these advantages, it wasn’t Google that kicked off the AI explosion. That honour went to OpenAI and its small experiment, ChatGPT, launched in late 2022. ChatGPT captured the world’s imagination and set off the generative AI gold rush.

Google was caught off guard. It scrambled to respond with Bard — a rushed, underwhelming product that only fueled narratives that Google was slow, bureaucratic, and no longer capable of leading the next wave of tech innovation.

Meanwhile, OpenAI and Microsoft raced ahead, integrating AI tools into search engines, office suites, and developer platforms. Google’s rivals grabbed mindshare and early enterprise traction. Public trust wavered, and the sense that Google had missed its moment only deepened.

But then the tech giant woke up.

Two years later, the story looks very different. Google’s stumble may have cost it the early headlines, but with its…