Google did to AI what Bell did to magnetic recording: retarded it's progress for decades because they were afraid it would harm their main product.
For those that don't know:
>In early 1934, Clarence Hickman, a Bell Labs engineer, had a secret machine, about six feet tall, standing in his office. It was a device without equal in the world, decades ahead of its time. If you called and there was no answer on the phone line to which Hickman’s invention was connected, the machine would beep and a recording device would come on allowing the caller to leave a message.
>Soon after Hickman had demonstrated his invention, AT&T ordered the Labs to cease all research into magnetic storage, and Hickman’s research was suppressed and concealed for more than sixty years, coming to light only when the historian Mark Clark came across Hickman’s laboratory notebook in the Bell archives.
>AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone.
https://gizmodo.com/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-ye...
The same thing was true for google, with the very real threat that something like perplexity will eat their lunch by having a monthly payment and no adds. With google relegated to a second tier API endpoint.
20 years of AI advancements were used for better add targeting in gmail, and in the months after chatgpt came out, a better spell checker.