Is Google playing catchup on search with OpenAI?

According to the author, he has been mulling over something that Will Heaven, MIT senior editor for AI, pointed out not too long ago: that all the big players in AI seem to be moving in the same directions and converging on the same things. Agents. Deep research. Lightweight versions of models. Etc. Some of this makes sense in that they’re seeing similar things and trying to solve similar problems. But it almost feels like a lack of imagination.

According to the author what got him thinking about this, again, was a pair of announcements from Google over the past couple of weeks, both related to the ways search is converging with AI language models, something he has spent a lot of time reporting on over the past year. Google took direct aim at this intersection by adding new AI features from Gemini to search, and also by adding search features to Gemini. In using both, what struck me more than how well they work is that they are really just about catching up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.  And their belated appearance in March of the year 2025 doesn’t seem like a great sign for Google.

Take AI Mode, which it announced March. It’s cool. It works well. Much of what these new features are doing, especially AI Mode’s ability to ask followup questions and go deep, feels like hitting feature parity with what ChatGPT has been doing for months. It’s also been compared to Perplexity, another generative AI search engine startup.

ChatGPT, as the company was preparing to roll out search, it has more freedom to innovate precisely because it doesn’t have the massive legacy business that Google does. Yes, it’s burning money while Google mints it. But OpenAI has the luxury of being able to experiment (at least until the capital runs out) without worrying about killing a cash cow like Google has with traditional search.

Of course, it’s clear that Google and its parent company Alphabet can innovate in many areas—see Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics announcement this week, for example. Or ride in a Waymo! But can it do so around its core products and business? It’s not the only big legacy tech company with this problem. Microsoft’s AI strategy to date has largely been reliant on its partnership with OpenAI. And Apple, meanwhile, seems completely lost in the wilderness.

Google has billions of users and piles of cash. It can leverage its existing base in ways OpenAI or Anthropic (which Google also owns a good chunk of) or Perplexity just aren’t capable of. But according to the author he is also pretty convinced that unless it can be the market leader here, rather than a follower, it points to some painful days ahead. But hey, Astra is coming. Let’s see what happens.