I think Google still has a decent chance of catching up. It's just a bit surprising to see them fall behind in an area they were supposed to be leading, especially since they wrote the paper which started all of this. Also, Anthropic is already kind of close to OpenAI, so I don't think OpenAI has some magic that no one else can figure out. In the future, I predict that these LLMs will become a commodity, and most of the available models will work for most tasks, so people will just choose the cheapest ones.