Google was not catching up before gpt-4. That's my point lol. all the sota llms belonged to google via deepmind and google brain/ai right up to the release of gpt-4. chinchilla, flamingo, flan-palm.
GPT-4 was finished in the summer of 2022. Several insiders gave interviews saying they were using it and building guardrails for it for the last 6 months or so.
OpenAI doesn’t publish as much as Google so we don’t really know how long or in what periods they were ahead.
And there’s no organization outside the US/UK/China with the same caliber of AI engineering output as Google.