Google, ChatGPT, and the challenge of innovation at a large firm

Hello. I'm Dr. Michael McDonald. I'm an associate professor of finance at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut, and today, I'd like to talk to you about the case of Google, ChatGPT, and the challenge of innovation at a large firm.

Google has been a leader in AI for years. Its DeepMind division, Google Brain, and advanced AI research capabilities made the firm one of the preeminent AI companies in the world. There were a number of key AI innovations over time before ChatGPT was ever really talked about. In particular, in 2017, Google pioneered the technology behind ChatGPT in a research publication titled "Attention Is All You Need", and this is what we refer to as transformer architecture. Then in 2018, we had a technology innovation called BERT which used Google Search to understand queries better. Then finally, we had conversational AI projects developed before ChatGPT by Google, in particular, LaMDA and Bard, but despite leading in AI research and having essentially unlimited resources, Google did not launch a consumer AI chatbot before OpenAI's ChatGPT. As a result, OpenAI, essentially, stole Google's thunder. When ChatGPT came on the scene, people were amazed at its capabilities and everybody started talking about all the different things they could do with this. A startup with limited resources and without