I would argue that Google didn't want to build this product at all and that it was a market reaction to ChatGPT's success (which suffers from the exact same pro

I would argue that Google didn't want to build this product at all and that it was a market reaction to ChatGPT's success (which suffers from the exact same problem I described above). The folks at DeepMind seemed quite keen on keeping this stuff in their research labs. Whether or not you want to call an LLM an "AI" or not is really immaterial though, and more often than not just a distraction. Users have found conversational answer engine products like ChatGPT and Gemini valuable. They don't have to be perfect to provide value, but their imperfections are ripe for tarnishing the brands of long well established companies. But LLMs also have uses outside of a conversational answer engine; I for one am excited to watch them deployed in games, and also writing unit tests for code.