Playing catch up and trying to attract talent from the hot-new-thing OpenAI requires incentives beyond lots of money. I contend actually being open helps.

I'm sure that's one reason Facebook has an open source model, scientists can care about ethics and could be attracted to openness.

The "Attention Is All You Need" guys all worked at Google. Google is where they are despite having the smart guys with a new idea a few years back.

Of course, IMHO it wouldn't have have helped Google if they'd kept the transformer architecture secret. They'd have fumbled it because they didn't realise what they had.

Only then did Google realise there might be something to this LLM stuff - so they responded with Bard, a product so poorly received they later had to completely rebrand it. Looks like they didn't have a "sentient" model up their sleeve after all. Then the updated, rebranded model had a bunch of image generation embarrassments of its own.

Admittedly, they have recovered somewhat since then; they're second on some performance leaderboards, which is respectable.

But there was a real tortoise-and-hare situation where they thought they were so far ahead they had time for a nap, until they got overtaken. Any lead they had from inventing transformers and being the only people with TPUs has been squandered.