> Overall, the former employees paint a picture of a company desperately behind its Big Tech rivals Google, Microsoft, and Meta in the race to launch AI chatbots and agents, and floundering in its efforts to catch up.<p>I obviously don't have any inside information, but this is a weird take to me from the outside.<p>Google has butchered Assistant since the advent of LLMs. My Google Home devices have lost basically all of their functionality, but in the meantime the new Gemini "replacement" is still by all accounts a disaster.<p>Microsoft has gone through all the right motions to satisfy investors—they've pushed their Copilot button onto new keyboards, pushed their Copilot tech into all their cloud products, and started selling "AI-ready" stickers on laptops. But from the consumer perspective, the reception has been not just mixed but overwhelmingly terrible! No one asked for these features, and no one wants them.<p>Meta, meanwhile, has released Llama, for which we're all grateful, but in terms of products what do they really have to offer? A much-maligned AI-powered fake social media feed?<p>None of the pre-existing giants are performing particularly well at actually "winning" the AI assistant space. Out of the three named, only Microsoft has any claim to serious mindshare, and that only through their relationship with OpenAI.