Google’s race from behind against OpenAI has ‘been like sprinting a marathon’

After OpenAI took the world by storm with the launch of ChatGPT, Google (GOOGL) reportedly gave its team working on artificial intelligence 100 days to build a competitor — fearful of falling behind in a race it had been leading.

More than two years later, the company’s Gemini AI models are among the top-ranked chatbots on community-driven platform Chatbot Arena, alongside rivals from OpenAI.

“It’s been like sprinting a marathon,” Sissie Hsiao, vice president and general manager of Gemini app and Speech at Google, told Wired. Hsiao and more than 50 current and former Google employees spoke to the publication about the race to develop its AI models and products.

Hsiao said the tech giant was asking for “quality over speed, but fast” when developing its chatbot, originally code-named Bard.

After initially launching the experimental AI chatbot in February 2023 — months after ChatGPT’s debut the previous November — Google was caught up in what Hsiao said was “an innocent mistake” when the company’s ad for Bard featured an incorrect answer.

By December of that year, Google attempted a comeback when it unveiled its renamed AI chatbot, Gemini, which outperformed ChatGPT in a majority of industry benchmarks.

The following February, Gemini hit another snag when its image generator made historically inaccurate images of people, such as racially diverse Nazi-era German soldiers. Hsiao reportedly gave the team time to fix the image generator before it rolled out the feature again in August.

Despite other missteps along the way, Google remains on par to some competitors, and ahead of others. Earlier this year, Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said Google’s AI leadership makes it “confident about the opportunities ahead,” and that the company expects to invest $75 billion in capital expenditures this year “to accelerate our progress.”

“Our results show the power of our differentiated full-stack approach to AI innovation and the continued strength of our core businesses,” Pichai said in a statement about the company’s fourth-quarter results. The quarter was “driven by” leadership in AI, Pichai said, including the AI Overviews feature in Google Search.

In December, Hsiao told Quartz that she sees the “next frontier” of AI in “agentic capabilities.”

Gemini, specifically, “will be deeply personalized, remember what you’ve told it before, and at your direction — be able to act on your behalf across Google, third-party services, and the web,” Hsiao said. Earlier this month, Google said it was experimenting with allowing Gemini to personalize its responses by connecting with other Google apps, starting with Search.

“Since 2016, we’ve said Google is an AI-first company, and that won’t change,” Hsiao told Quartz in December. “AI is a must-have, and as we see it being integrated into every aspect of a company’s operations from product development, customer service, to marketing, and sales — it’s essential to embrace this technology in order to stay competitive.”