A few days ago, I shared some thoughts on Google. The core message was how a seemingly declining giant defied everyone's expectations and reclaimed its position. Today, I want to pick up where we left off and share the other half of that story.
I am not here to blindly sing Google's praises. But I am also not ready to declare them finished. In this new AI era, Google made some serious blunders and lost our trust. Yet they never threw in the towel. That resilience is something countless companies need to study.
Before we look forward, we have to look back at the missteps.
Stumbling Out of the Starting Gate
On February 8, 2023, Google finally unveiled its answer to ChatGPT. The AI was named Bard, and the launch was massive, with the global press watching closely.
But there was a fatal flaw. In the promotional video released just before the event, Bard gave an incorrect answer. In a single day, a staggering $85 billion of Google's market capitalization evaporated.
They tripped over their own feet before the fight with ChatGPT even started. But was this really just a simple mistake?
The Trap of the Golden Goose
The moment ChatGPT hit the world, alarm bells rang inside Google. Things were so serious that retired founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were called back to manage the crisis. Still, Bard kept making errors.
The real root of these mistakes was not the engineering. Search is Google's ultimate cash cow, a core business that moves tens of billions of dollars a year. But if AI perfectly replaces traditional search, those billions vanish. Google was essentially being forced to cut off its own lifeline.
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| Protecting the search cash cow vs. embracing the AI future |
Innovate, and you destroy your own business model. Don't innovate, and you get left behind. Google was trapped in an impossible paradox. Bard's early failures were not a lack of skill. They were a direct byproduct of fear.
Nine out of ten people worldwide use Google. That is a habit built over two decades. But the arrival of ChatGPT began shifting the ground beneath the market. Instead of typing keywords into a search bar, people just started asking the AI.
I do this myself. For most of my daily questions, I turn to AI. Digging through traditional search results hoping to find someone with the exact same situation as me is frustrating. When I ask an AI, it hands me precisely what I need.
Despite seeing this shift, Google had to sit on its hands. Why? Search ads. The moment they put AI search at the center of their business, people would stop looking at advertisements. Clicks would disappear. Revenue would tank. Search ads were their biggest weapon, and they could not afford to drop it, even as the world changed around them.
How does a tech empire fall into the trap of its own success? While writing this column, I found a lot of inspiration in The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, an excellent book that dives deep into Google's inside story. If you want to understand what is really happening behind the scenes, I highly recommend it.
[Buy 'The Coming Wave' on Amazon]
Smoke, Mirrors, and a $60 Billion Glitch
Fast forward to late 2023. Google released a video showcasing Gemini. It analyzed drawings, understood speech, and solved complex problems. The press and the public were blown away, thinking Google had finally caught up to ChatGPT. The stock surged.
A few days later, the truth came out.
"The video was essentially staged. It was not recognizing voice in real time, and it was not answering on the fly. What we saw was dramatically different from reality."
Even Google employees criticized it internally, leaking to the press that the video had been heavily edited to make the AI look far more capable than it actually was.
Google had to admit it. The stock dropped immediately.
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| The AI-generated images that sparked a global controversy |
But it did not end there. In February 2024, users testing Gemini's image generation asked it to draw America's Founding Fathers and a Nazi soldier. The results were bizarre. The Founding Fathers appeared as Black men, and the Nazi soldiers as Asian. For a company that dominates global search, generating historically inaccurate images for basic prompts was simply incomprehensible.
Google issued a belated apology and shut the feature down entirely. Let's be clear: it was not that Google lacked the technology. They rushed the launch, made mistakes, and as those mistakes piled up, trust crumbled. Once a user turns their back, they rarely return.
The Root of the Crisis
All of these fumbles trace back to one brutal truth.Google did not truly believe their own technology was going to change the world.
How do I know? Because their key researchers all left. If the people inside the company do not have faith, the conviction to keep pushing boundaries disappears with them.
If the story ended here, Google would be remembered as a washed-up giant that once ruled the world. But they did not give up. They acknowledged their missteps and started playing the cards they had been holding back.
The Unfair Advantages Nobody Else Has
There is a very specific reason Google is not going to fail, and I think you will agree.
For over 20 years, they have been collecting the search data of the entire planet. They know what people are curious about, what they want to buy, and what keeps them up at night. No other AI company comes close to having this kind of data.
And it is not just data. OpenAI relies entirely on outside infrastructure for the servers and chips to run their AI. Without Microsoft, OpenAI does not survive. Google is completely different. They have their own servers and their own custom chips. The cost for them to run AI is dramatically lower than any competitor.
The Ultimate Cheat Code
On top of all that, Google holds one massive advantage nobody talks about enough: YouTube.
Every single day, people around the world watch 1 billion hours of YouTube.
In the AI era, video data is the most powerful resource you can have. And Google is getting that data for free from 2.5 billion people every single day. That is an advantage nobody can replicate.
Slipping Into Your Everyday Life
Building a great AI is one thing. Weaving it seamlessly into people's daily lives is an entirely different challenge. Google already owns the pipeline. It is called Android.
Seven out of ten smartphones on the planet run Android, and Gemini is now built directly into them. You do not need to download a separate app. Google does not even need to run ads for it. It is already sitting in the hands of 4 billion people.
While you have to actively seek out ChatGPT, Google is already waiting in your pocket.
The results are showing in the numbers. At the end of 2023, Gemini had 7 million users. Today that number stands at a staggering 750 million. A 100-fold increase in just two years. They were late to the party, but they never stopped moving.
Google made real mistakes and lost real trust. But they have recognized their failures and fully understand the powerful assets they are sitting on. The real game is only just beginning. I will be keeping a close eye on what comes next, and I would love to hear your take. Let me know in the comments below.
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