The outside world gets a glimpse into what is happening at Google right now by looking at the people who leave Google. I wouldn't have been surprised if Google had invested in Character, a startup which was formed by Ex-Google LM people. To cite The Information [0]:

"At Google, Character’s co-founders Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas were instrumental in developing Google’s LaMDA language model, used for natural language processing research. They decided to launch their own startup after getting frustrated with big company bureaucracies, Shazeer previously told The Information."

[0]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/character-seeks-250-...