Reading through all the comments here, and having thought about this a bit - here is why I think OpenAI will probably win here, regardless of what Google offers

Reading through all the comments here, and having thought about this a bit - here is why I think OpenAI will probably win here, regardless of what Google offers: the chat experience with OpenAI. It's not so much about accuracy even. It's just that we mostly like talking to ChatGPT and we don't like talking to Google, not really. And not only that, regardless of how wrong ChatGPT may be on any given prompt - this is now a "worse is better" situation for Google, because Google is saddled with years of baggage from just being Google regardless of the quality of their results. Anyone who has any negative feelings about the Internet (everyone) therefore also has negative feelings about Google, because Google is the Internet. And I'm not even getting into issues Google has directly created for their own brand here. Hopefully for OpenAI, their brand doesn't get too closely associated with Microsoft in the public mind, but that may not matter much after all. Talking with ChatGPT is fun and fresh. Talking with Google could maybe be, if they can resist the temptation to insert their name into it.