Doubling down on LLMs specifically (which came out of their own research). Also getting to a point to commercialize it first. Their TPU fleet wasn’t really optimized for LLMs until recently afaik.
Besides I dont think the top people at Google's DeepMind - and I can only "infer" this from watching them speek online - actually think LLM's are "the one".
Note also that many of Google's previous attempts with LLM generated significant press controversy, and it was in Google's interest to let other groups take the heat for a while while the overton window shifted.
>a dead end
Sure, pal.