Why would they have secret unreleased models?

Surely Google can find another team of code monkeys to whip out a frontend if there is money to be made.

I don't think Google is going to pull back from making some more money.

I think the most likely option is that they have a bunch of talented academics who get paid on time to work on what interest them - but they're the stereotypical large inefficient company and they can't coordinate the effort of productionizing some cool models before the competition.