> Bing suffers from being so historically unpopular that from a branding perspective it's synonymous with failure.

AI integration is exactly the type of feature that could upend that. Google is the lackadaisical incumbent, too afraid of short term ad revenue decline to innovate. They've mastered shoving more ads onto the SERP pages and playing aggravating skip button games on Youtube.

They are no less corporate and staid as MS at this point, so if they fall behind I'd have no qualms in dropping them.

Why should Google risk their brand reputation in this way? The majority of their users probably have never heard of ChatGPT. They just know Google as the thing that gives them factual information. Google have something to lose by directing their enormous user base to a buggy ChatGPT clone.

Bing isn't unpopular, it's just a non-entity. They don't have any brand value to harm.

> that can quickly be iterated on. It's pretty dubious to assume problems with this tech can be fixed on a short time scale

But if Google releases something that's bad or drags down the search experience then they have a lot to lose. If Bing releases something that's bad, then nothing is lost.