Waymo's goals, for example, probably focus less on abstract research and publication. They exist to build a thing and make it a business eventually. Whatever AI research they do exists to support that. Waymo are really big, so that can still be a lot.
Most AI projects google have are probably smaller, and/or less publication focused. Also newer. Deepmind is >10 years old.
Google bought Deepmind when they already had impressively successful results. Once the bought the company, they started to apply stuff from Alphago to anything they could think of with Google level access to computing resources. Within a few years they started having successes in some of these areas. This is basically a project coming to fruition.
I think the project has a very "make it more general" orientation and their approach yields a "hey look, it works for this now" success story at regular intervals.
Start to worry when intervals hit the ohm frequency and deep thought pops into existence asking for a sandwich .