> Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I'm sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like piling on from the outside, but in all honestly it really feels to me like a classic case of "big company that lost its way
Former Googler, opinions are my own. They haven't lost their way technologically - as you mentioned they invented the Transformer - and internally Google has long had language models that rival ChatGPT in sheer size and coherence of responses (hallucinations and all). Bard is an intentionally toned down version of LamDa.
The reason they didn't release their LLM earlier was likely due to the serious brand risk associated with making it part of Google search. Bing/ChatGPT had no such brand risk, and released their LLMs using the "There's no such thing as bad publicity" logic. That works great as a wrecking ball, but it's not a long term product strategy.
So the real institutional problem at Google isn't lack of technological innovation, it's the inability to take major product risks, especially in anything adjacent to Search.