Comment by HardCodedBias

Bard was horrible compared to the competition of the time.

Gemini 1.0 was strictly worse than GPT-3.5 and was unusable due to "safety" features.

Google followed that up with 1.5 which was still worse than GPT-3.5 and unbelievably far behind GPT-4. At this same time Google had their "black nazi" scandals.

With Gemini 2.0 finally had a model that was at least useful for OCR and with their fash series a model that, while not up to par in capabilities, was sufficiently inexpensive that it found uses.

Only with Gemini-2.5 did Google catch up with SoTA. It was within "spitting distance" of the leading models.

Google did indeed drop the ball, very, very badly.

I suspect that Sergey coming back helped immensely, somehow. I suspect that he was able to tame some of the more dysfunctional elements of Google, at least for a time.