I left pretty soon after a Google engineer decided the internal chat bot was sentient but before ChatGPT 3.5 came out. So I missed the entire period where Google was trying to catch up.

But it seemed to me before I left that they were struggling to productize the bot and keep it from saying things that damage the brand. That's definitely something OpenAI figured out first.

I got the feeling that maybe Microsoft's Tay experience cast a large shadow on Google's willingness to take its chat bot public.