It seems like the entire industry is in pure panic about AI, not just Google. Everyone hopes that LLMs will end years of homeopathic growth through iteration of long-existing technology, which is why it attracts tons of venture capital.
Google, which sits where IBM was decades ago, is too big, too corporate and too slow now, so they needed years to react to this fad. When they finally did, all they were able to come up with was a rushed equivalent of existing LLMs that suffers from all of the same problems.
The type of capitalism found in China is known as state capitalism and it’s an unholy blend of central planning and free markets, with the government owning significant stakes in all key industries, exerting a massive control over both the economy and society as a whole using all of the methods used by previous Communist autocracies, only this time with far more technology.