Do we actually know a bit more on what people were let go, from what teams? Maybe the percentage of AI people in Google actually has grown relatively now?

And Google is in fact using AI almost everywhere in production already. You have some sort of AI in almost every product. Also language models are everywhere, e.g. just prediction of typing on your phone, or in GMail, in speech recognition, and many other places. I think they just do not use the biggest models for those things but some more efficient models, which can partly even run offline on your device (e.g. for the typing prediction).

Also in Google search, they use lots of AI, also neural networks.

It's just that for LaMDA specifically, they don't have a good product yet.