For one, they have the internal models that us normies don't have. Also, machine learning as a field is probably the most automate-able field for AI. It's 100% on computers without "real world" collisions at all, AI can do the whole stack today even with publicly available models. And since it's so empirical, you can make a lot of progress by just running more experiments with more compute.

Eh. I’d say only some parts can be done on computers. Hence the whole deep investment in wetlabs and robotics. Those are the next frontier in models