With credit to Google, they were basically neck-and-neck with Facebook AI Research in a lot of ways. Both were publishing text transformers (BERT vs FastText), both were maintaining SOTA inference libraries (Tensorflow vs Pytorch) and both were investing heavily into researching the field further. I'd even argue that Google was the largest contributor to making open-source AI more like Linux and less like a shitty proprietary product.
There's a whole history of recent machine-learning development where both Google and Facebook have worked together and against each other to push things forward. I think it's entirely mistaken to characterize Google as the understudy when in many ways it's the other way around.
I mean I have been watching what Google has been doing in AI with wonder for ages and do agree that they seem to be rather underrated merely because they've recently been caught on the back foot.
At the end of the day though I use Llama and I use GPT4 and I don't use Bard. Google has an amazing legacy around AI but it really hasn't been performing in the last couple of years. I can imagine they'll have a comeback, but one does wonder if Google has lost their mojo.
There's a whole history of recent machine-learning development where both Google and Facebook have worked together and against each other to push things forward. I think it's entirely mistaken to characterize Google as the understudy when in many ways it's the other way around.