The problem is all these new labs don't have any competitive advanatge amongst each other, talent can only take one so far, though Jeff is a legend no doubt.
Models are commodities the applications eg. BaseTen, OpenRouter should capture the value.
https://taikhooms.substack.com/p/why-openrouter-can-be-the-n...
I think Google's branding was starting to be too poor in AI to get top talent, they needed the refresh
Model routers - send all of your data through a third party who totally swears not to peek at it.
If youre doing anything high value (advanced research, classified work, high value industrial research, health data) then sending your data through a third party like that is insane.
The company is developing an application, or a class of applications. Not a new model.