The money and compute is not the innovation. The LLM models and associated tools are, which is work by OpenAI employees and teams, not Microsoft employees/teams.
Nobody knew that scaling transformer architecture would lead to the emergent intelligence we see today. Among other things, OpenAI did R&D for years on that. Also the only situation where this could true is if Google knew that LLMs could lead to this intelligence and decided to not make it happen, (along with every other tech company now that is furiously trying to catch up to OpenAI), which is absurd.
That's a very strange way to read (the inverse of) the word "most".
It seems that Google really didn't know what to do with the tech, and hadn't figured out a way to control it (OpenAI's RLHF - critical for ChatGPT's success). It's a bit ironic that DeepMind were doing so much with RL, but Google Brain being separate at the time apparently were not consulting with them or tapping into their expertise.