Moreso they're good at attracting talent. Note the attention is all you need paper came out in 2017 - was so hamstrung under Google, that Noam left Google to start Character AI. There he was reportedly close to a foundational model that would've crushed benchmarks. Until Google literally bought him back for $2.7B [1]

[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/noam-shazeer-google-ai-deal-d360...