I was ignoring all the "ChatGPT caught Google flatfooted" talk thinking today's event might prove doubters wrong but they were right, it was mainly a recap of minor features no one cares about. The Bing announcement wasn't the step change many people are saying it was but at least it came with a fresh coat of paint and some amount of interactivity in the UI and it wasn't a total waste of time like the Google thing.

Holding back their LLM offering was obviously a huge strategic error but not having a thousand functional chat based search UI mockups ready for just an eventuality is an inexcusable and fireable offense.

My understanding is that Pichai was brought in because he was this level headed people pleaser but recent events have shown he's way too passive and his lasting legacy might be Google losing their considerable AI lead and starting down the road to irrelevance.