I think they are I forgot where but I did read that this is a lightweight model and they are still working on the main one.

I dont’t think now is the right time to optimize for cost (if I were in google’s shoes)

I would disagree

They will rollout to masses, which is as important as its performance.

OpenAI has rolled out to the masses as well apparently (unless I am missing something).

Bard will be under intense scrutiny from the public in the short term.

Any sign of weakness against GPT4 might kill the product in the public opinion.

It makes a lot more sense IMO to throw money at the problem in the short-term, and optimize later. They are playing catch-up.

IMO, currently Openai api is slow and not ready for production use for real time scenarios.

This is a life-or-death situation for Google right now.

They could throw 5% of their available cash at it, and it would still make sense.

FB threw $19B at the whatsapp acquisition and it was a hell of a good deal.

Yup, Google is not allowed to flounder at the moment

Or the whole company going under.

Same of AWS, or other big techs as well.