Why Google Missed ChatGPT

The tech giant believes the future of search is conversational. How did it let OpenAI’s ChatGPT

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Google’s had an awkward week. After years of preaching that conversational search was its future, it’s stood by as the world discovered ChatGPT.

The powerful chatbot from OpenAI takes queries — some meant for the search bar — and answers with astonishing conversational replies. It’s shared recipes, reviewed code, and argued politics so adeptly that screenshots of its answers now fill social media. This was the future Google promised. But not with someone else fulfilling it.

How Google missed this moment is not a simple matter of a blind spot. It’s a case of an incumbent being so careful about its business, reputation, and customer relationships that it refused to release similar, more powerful tech. And it’s far from the end of the story.

“Google thinks a lot about how something can damage its reputation,” said Gaurav Nemade, an ex-Google product manager who was first to helm its LaMDA chatbot. “They lean on the side of conservatism.”

Google’s LaMDA — made famous when engineer Blake Lemoine called it sentient — is a more capable bot than ChatGPT, yet the company’s…