Yes, I agree with you that the race all the AI companies are running doesn't make sense, but at the same time, there are rumors that Google has produced newer versions of Pro without releasing them to the public.

Version 3.1 has plenty of room for improvement, yet they don't seem to be giving the attention it deserves or at least communicating accordingly.

There is more to the cost of a model than its training. While training is a significant Capex expenditure, it has very low Operational cost after training unless it is deployed for public inference.

It may be that they wish to slow their cadence of releases, or develop their models to focus more in a different direction, etc. No matter what the actual reasoning, they have chosen to not compete in the same race, and I cannot say I fault them.