Bragging rights to say they have a SOTA model. I guess that was more like Google of 10 years ago with moonshot projects. Nowadays, yeah, perhaps if it's not helping sell ads, it doesn't make sense.
It would be utter stupidity if they keep competing with hyper agile frontier labs. They sensibly moving to big infra provider and that's good niche.
> .. perhaps if it's not helping sell ads,
Perhaps cloud business is also a thing which is making big revenue
At worst Google just need to keep the lights on until the frontier labs file for bankruptcy under the weight of that >$1tn debt they've built up paying for FAANG's data centers. Then Google walks away from all of this with the the best remaining models, best R&D lab, and several hundred billion dollars in infrastructure on their balance sheet.
Catch is, even Googlers internally do not have access to top-tier models. (or did not until recently, when apparently Claude was made accessible to the SWEs internally).
Funny enough, after trying it, I went back to G3.8