There was no competition in academic publishing until openai made it so! The research probably started way before gpt4 became a thing.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but model architecture is not the most significant differentiator in LLMs. Not publishing creates negative externalities around collaboration, recruiting etc. and any research organization worth their salt knows better not do avoid publishing. It's similar to the fallacy that Google should've never open-sourced Kubernetes as it allowed other cloud providers to out-compete them.

To me model architecture sounds the most important.

Stable diffusion was possible because diffusion model architecture and then doing it in latent space instead of image space and then upscaling.

Of course someone still needed to train it, but they did it when it was theoretically possible.

Researchers will work for less money if they are allowed to publish.

this.

Every single decision Google makes is to avoid being seen by the government as a web advertising monopoly. Being seen as a competitor to adjacent tech companies is what they after, as they have no competitor in display advertising.