Hot take: I think google is not so much on the frontier model race anymore. The race is now on routing tasks to cheaper models leaving frontier models only for the hardest tasks. But ALL models will run on the infrastructure that google, Amazon and Microsoft have and they get to charge high margin toll booth fees on those. They will gain when volume of tokens used 100xs from here because of more efficient routing. Frontier model providers are not in the best strategic spot. Because google is no longer so concerned with winning frontier, scientists are indeed leaving to labs where they can work on cutting edge.