Nice analogy! This seems to me the main difference between Google and the other companies you list -- In regards to LLMs Google is the only one mostly acting like an mature, established organization and not rushing to market as soon as possible. For their responsibility they often get labelled as having fumbled some imagined race. Maybe they actually do just lack the talent to make better models but it's not like they aren't making advances in other areas of AI.

What a great analogy, can't believe I haven't heard it before