All this is pure speculation:

I have absolutely no inside info or actual knowledge to back up this hunch, but part of me thinks Google released PaLM2 just to get something out the door that was somewhat comparable to OpenAI's models.

That way they can say they put something out and that they're "competing", but internally, maybe they're really looking forward to (and working on) their next-gen AI models. Something to compete with a hypothetical future GPT-5, but maybe they're looking to get their version out faster than OpenAI can. I feel like Google is really going to give it their all on the next-gen model they release (not PaLM 2, but whatever they're working on after it).

Curious to hear other people's thoughts on this.