This is only specifically for web interface LLMs in the past few years that it's been lack luster. However, this statements is not correct for their overall history. W2V based lang models and BERT/Transformer models in the early days (*publicly available, but not in web interface) were far ahead of the curve, as they were the ones that produced these innovations. Effectively, Deepmmind/Google are academics (where the real innovations are made, but they do struggle to produce corporate products (where openai shines).