Mostly I dog on Apple and Microsoft because both companies didn't even attempt to compete. They ignored machine learning when it was taking off (FAIR/BERT era), refused to ship complex GPU designs instead of NPUs though it was the only thing working (eg. Nvidia vs everyone else), and they continue to lag behind all their peers in local model development. The most impressive contribution either company makes to Open Source AI is the support they write for Tensorflow and Pytorch - neither of which they even own. If you erased every contribution that Apple and Microsoft made to AI research, the entire field could pick up where it left off tomorrow.
Google's got problems, but AI is something they are far-and-away better at than their contemporaries. It is just Google and Facebook at this echelon, which is embarrassing but frankly expected given how stagnant and anticompetitive Apple and Microsoft's business models have become.
And of course there's no privacy with OpenAI either, not anymore so than with Google. But at least I know what I'm buying with that - an actual SOTA model, not a runner up. Google can't even beat Anthropic.
Google's AI offerings are in a very weird spot right now. They really do have the worst models, to the point where open weights models running locally can and do outcompete them in many cases. Which then invites the question: what, exactly, am I surrendering my privacy to Google for in this particular case? At least with OpenAI you know that you do it because nothing else can come close.