Google is a search engine company and LLMs and related technologies are basically an existential risk to their core business -- ads in search. Anything they do to improve AI has a potential to kill their golden goose. Like imagine they actually do produce a breakthrough LLM but don't know how to monetize it yet and traffic to google search craters.

If you're the best horse and buggy company in the world, do you go all in on building cars or just keep doing what you're good at and extract profits while you still can? I don't think the right answer is obvious -- just like it's not at all obvious that ICE car companies should pivot to electric, and they've been pretty bad at electric cars for the same reasons.