Did ChatGPT come first or Gemini, Sundar Pichai wants to remind you of the engineer who…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has a message for anyone who thinks the company missed the AI chatbot wave: it didn’t. It just didn’t ship first. In a conversation on Stripe co-founder John Collison’s podcast Cheeky Pint, Pichai made a pointed reference to the Blake Lemoine saga—the 2022 episode where a Google engineer publicly claimed the company’s LaMDA chatbot had become sentient. But Pichai wasn’t relitigating the sentience debate. He was using it to make a product argument—one that reframes Google’s role in the generative AI story entirely.

“If you remember, there was an engineer inside who thought it was sentient.