So the lesson they could only take from their failings is to limit publishing instead of capitalizing on new techs? Almost every if not all authors of "Attention is all you need" left Google before ChatGPT broke the world. If the paper was internal I suspect they would have probably left even earlier, taken their ideas elsewhere and still beaten Google to it. If everyone stayed hush hush, Google might not even know what gave other's an edge. There's no secret to AI as we know it today, deep learning, RL, transformers, LOTS and LOTS of data, plus lots and lots of training.