Google is large enough, well-funded enough, and the opportunity is great enough to run experiments.

You don't necessarily have to prove it out on large foundation models first. Can it beat out a 32b parameter model, for example?

Do you think there might be an approval process to navigate when experiments costs might run seven or eight digits and months of reserved resources?

While they do have lots of money and many people, they don't have infinite money and specifically only have so much hot infrastructure to spread around. You'd expect they have to gradually build up the case that a large scale experiment is likely enough to yield a big enough advantage over what's already claiming those resources.