Correct.
> would it be valid to interpret that as an attack as well?
Yup.
Joking aside, I also don't believe that maximum access to raw Internet data and its quantity is why some models are doing better than Google. It seems that these SoTA models gain more power from synthetic data and how they discard garbage.
They should at least release the weights of their old/deprecated models, but no, that would be losing money.