The evidence for this is the trotting out of Imagen a month

 The evidence for this is the trotting out of Imagen a month 

after DALL-E 2, though like practically every other interesting AI research Google publicized, it was not available for anyone to test out, let alone connect to an API. Then, after Meta released Make-A-Video in September, Google responded with Imagen Video a week later. Riffusion made waves for generating music, and a month later, here comes MusicLM (which you can’t use).

But surely it was ChatGPT that caused Google leadership to swiftly transition from anxiety to full-on flop sweat.

It would have been clear to all involved that this kind of conversational AI was categorically different from the Assistant products Google had been investing in for a decade, and was actually doing what everyone else’s pseudo-AIs (effectively just natural language frontends for a collection of APIs) pretended to. That’s what’s called an existential threat.