Google has been basically giving away technology for free, which was easy because of all the easy money. It's good for reputation and attracting the best talent. That is, until a competitor starts to threaten to overtake you with the technology you gave them (ChatGPT based on LLM research, Edge based on Chromium, etc.).
Chrome is experiencing unprecedented competition because it faltered on the product. Chrome went from synonymous with fast-and-snappy to synonymous with slow-and-bloated.
Likewise Google invented transformers - but the sin isn't giving it away, it's failing to exercise the technology itself in a compelling way. At any moment in time Google could have released ChatGPT (or some variation thereof), but they didn't.
I've made this point before - but Google's problems have little to do with how it's pursuing fundamental research, but everything to do with how it pursues its products. The failure to apply fundamental innovations that happened within its own halls is organizational.
However, the bloat problem you’ve described are difficult problems to solve, and are to some degree endemic to large businesses with established products.
Sure, but the idea is that if they didn't share their technology, they'd still be in the same spot: they would have invented transformers and still not shipped major products around it.
Sure maybe OpenAI won't exist, but competitors will find other ways to compete. They always do.
So at best they are very very slightly better off than the alternative, but being secretive IMO wouldn't have been a major change to their market position.
Meanwhile, if Google was better at productizing its research, it matters relatively little what they give away. They would be first to market with best-in-class products, the fact that there would be a litany of clones would be a minor annoyance at best.
They were too risk averse before.
From where? 65% globally use Chrome (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers).
The only widespread competition is from Safari and FF, both of which have been around longer than it.