Less than a year difference is "quite far behind"?

Lotus 1-2-3 came out 4 years before Microsoft Excel. WordPerfect came out 4 years before Microsoft Word.

Hotmail launched 8 years before Gmail. Yahoo! Mail was 7 years before Gmail.

Heck, AltaVista launched 3 years before Google Search.

I don't think less than a year difference is meaningful at all in the big picture.

GPT-4 launched a little less than 9 months ago.

This is interesting in that it implies that catching up is possible if you have enough data, engineers and compute. This also potentially implies that adjacent players such as Nvidia could gain an edge long term because they are a leader in one of the three.

Gemini looks like a better GPT-4 but without the frequent outages.