They absolutely sat on this and waited until a competitor announced something, so they could suck the air out of the room.

Not to mention, the Gemini 1.5 Pro announcement was almost all technical talk whereas Sora is light on text and heavy on demonstration.

I'm actually worried about the future of Google at this point. They really seem to be struggling under their own weight.

And the tech demo of GPT-4 was Sam interacting with the thing and showing what it did well and where it faltered. We could also access the thing soon after. Not so with Gemini. Hell even Mixtral got me more excited.

What was released during the first time?

GPT-4 was released at the same time as Bard was announced I believe (same day, same hour basically).

I too noticed the coincidence. Not to be a conspiracy theorist but part of me wonders if they share this information with each other, or if OpenAI has advancements like these sitting in the chamber and they are willing wait a few weeks before they release them to maximize the impact of the timing.