I mean it might be causing some of Googles problems but the AI stuff is very obviously because their teams are academia-brained as in they have the mind virus that the work is making papers and getting citations not shipping products into the real world and making money.

Google had a decade headstart on several AI unicorns tech and did nothing but write a paper and say "No you can't see the code, no you can't use the model, oh maybe here's a video of it working or at best a Google Labs project that shows a small fraction of its potential in a gimmicky way only available in the US and that stops working after a few months".

Google will forever be playing catchup from now, where they had such a massive headstart.