Recent developments have placed tech giant Google at the tail end of the industry it helped birth. And this is nothing but artificial intelligence. He recently launched an experimental chat service, Bard, but had problems from the start. On top of that, there have been scandals, failed attempts and loss of talent in the past, so the combination of these factors explains the awkward position in which the American group finds itself today.

It’s worth noting, as mentioned in a related Forbes article, that in 2016, a few months after he became Google’s CEO, Sandar Pichai made a scathing statement at the company’s conference. Google, whose name has become synonymous with search, will now be primarily an artificial intelligence company. While this goal was vague, the stakes were crystal clear.

Two years earlier, in 2014, Amazon overtook Google with the launch of its Alexa voice assistant. It’s a household name today, but back then it was a major blow to Google, whose mission was to “Organize the World’s Information” and such a service should have been the company’s birthright. At the conference, Google released a rival device simply called Assistant, further evidence of its focus on useful artificial intelligence.

Microsoft has announced a new version of its own Bing search engine with even more advanced AI chat features than ChatGPT.

Seven years later, Google found itself in a similar position, once again being defeated in an area it should have dominated. But this time things are worse. In the current coup, the usurper is OpenAI, a relatively small start-up company based in San Francisco, not a deep-pocketed giant like Amazon.

The product is ChatGPT, a robot that can write from the simplest to the most complex text, i.e. the script of the series, the letter of resignation, the code, and in general any text on any topic, and which is understood as if a person writes. It was built using a technological innovation that Google pioneered many years ago. The technology, released in November, has become incredibly popular, according to Forbes, despite the fact that Google announced a similar technology called LaMDA two years ago.

What’s worse is that Microsoft, Google’s main competitor, is providing $10 billion to OpenAI. On Tuesday, the company even announced a new version of its own search engine, Bing, with even more advanced AI chat features than ChatGPT.

This is a potentially existential step for the future of web search. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that “the race is on and every day we want to highlight something new.” The announcement comes a day after Google appeared to be rushing to release Bard, its own chatbot that uses a “much smaller” version of LaMDA technology with limited availability. The company has promised wider rollout in the coming weeks. As many expected, Google woke up, Pichai sounded the alarm and hired the co-founders to be the first to rethink their AI strategy, now in the light of the latest competitor data.