because they hate money? google is the only frontier lab that isn't hundreds of billions in the red.

Because they do months of testing. Also, if they have models that are really good at AI research, I’d not expect full versions to ever be released, precisely because of their love of money.

My assumption is that they're overly expensive to run at scale and/or don't have the same safeguards that public models have and possibly get better results because of that. If a model is 100x more expensive to run but 4x better results, of course you'd use that internally to make your product even better - it's compounding returns. But people aren't going to pay 100x their current bill for 4x results.

Inference on the research models they have is likely more expensive than the released ones.