I am guessing as Google is vertically integrated and "actually pays" for AI infra (compared to OpenAI & Anthropic that receives hardware as partnerships) they have a more urgent incentive to reduce model sizes. Also, Google and Apple will be the first to gain from running model on-device
This seems to be an inference-time optimization and they are putting AI on every search result page. That seems like plenty of incentive to optimize.
I can assure you OpenAI and Anthropic pay for hardware. They don’t receive it for free.