It's important to understand that there's a difference between "R&D" as it lives in most people's minds here, and "R&D" as it presents in financial reporting. The former is associated with hiring PhD's and building labs. The latter is everything not covered by cost of sales. Different companies balance the buckets in different ways at different times. And there are many activities that fall under the latter that most would not associate with the former. Companies that make staples report R&D on their financials too. And companies that fund AI also do a lot of R&D that looks the R&D that goes into making staples.

So are we talking more A/B testing and less qubit development (or other moonshot projects)?

I feel like this is good for Google in the long term. I remember when their new CFO took charge a couple years back, she cut a lot of "excess" to make it more profitable, but some of the Google flavor is allowing employees to mess around on pet projects. Gmail is easily the best example of that.

Google Cloud is hiring at truly stupefying rate.

The rest of Google is merely hiring like crazy.

Interesting isn't it? The most exciting option seems to me if something they were trying to do proved to work well enough that they went on to much heavier investment to seize the opportunity. (Beta-bet?)