Yes agreed - I wrote this up a while back https://martinalderson.com/posts/whats-going-on-with-gemini/

My view then was they are optimising the models for inference ability on their own hardware AND use cases, which is often speed and time to first token.

They've somehow seemed to end up with terrible compute shortages, which again is surprising given how good Google is at infra deployments AND have their own hardware. From rumors out there they are turning down enterprise deals for Gemini because they don't have the compute.

The problem is they're falling further and further behind on frontier class on coding especially, and since I wrote that article it's got even worse with open weights models undercutting them on price AND intelligence.