.. but is that true?

MSR has been putting out research in all derivatives of modern large neural network architectures (NLP, CV, etc.) for the same amount of time that Google has. If there was a drift between timelines, its not large IMO.

What you could argue is that Google historically was more successful in their research outputs.

However, historical consumption of resources may not compare to current resources consumption.

> I doubt we have the visibility to know how they compare in terms of available flops and the unit costs

Completely agreed, unfortunately, this is all guesswork at best