alt Hacker NewsThere's a story to tell in that: 1) Google has a transformer-based AI that hallucinates too much to release 2) OpenAI replicates the tech then YOLOs it 3) Everyone says: look how Google is getting left behind! Google thinks: the second mouse gets the cheese. 4) Google gets the cheese, OpenAI is absorbed by Microsoft or just disappears (or both).
Certainly could turn out that way.
TPUs were their real moat. All that capacity used throughout their suite of products on non-chatbot features, ready to rip for consumers once soon as somebody else opened the floodgates to the public.
Now all their competitors lose money on every token paying their cloud providers (of course it's funny money, maybe they're just giving the cloud providers equity) while Google is sitting calmly over there, actually owning everything they need for any eventuality, and beholden to nobody.