There are companies out there that take the lead in a market and go on to refuse offers from Google. Google isn't all-powerful. People do say no to them.
GroupOn is probably that biggest. They turned down a $6bn offer. They're now worth $258m, down 92% from a peak of almost $16bn, so maybe not the best example over the long term, but they did say no.
How do you know Google doesn't have a similar LLM? Just because they haven't decided to replace search with it doesn't mean they don't have or can't develop one themselves.
On top of the fact that Google has probably the most advanced AI R&D program in the world. When these tools are eventually deployable to the masses, Google will probably be the one doing it.
It's not that they can't acquire. In fact they invented this tech and have their own models just as good. But the "problem" is you can run such a model on a computer of your own, like Stable Diffusion. And this model could interface between you and the web, doing the final part of question answering. Then you are not forced to see any ads. So the language model has the potential to free us from their ads. You can download a language model, you can't "download a Google".
If you don't think you can run a decent language model on a normal computer check out Google's own FLAN T5 series. Local language models mean more privacy and empowerment for everyone.
