Frankly, I think your belief is due to lack of knowledge. As a current PhD student who knows several ML researchers at Google, there is fair bit of marketing involved in creating perception of Google supremacy. while no doubt Google is a leader in AI, their advantage is not as great as it would appear by reading the comments here.

At the same time other companies, Apple /Salesforce / Amazon / Oracle and several other smaller ones are well aware of threat posed by Google and are always on the lookout for ML/CV startup that can fill the gap in products relative to Googles offering. E.g. Amazon acquired Orbeus around same time Google launched Cloud Vision.