It could be because they actually released something. If you look back, the Google Research blog posts always have grandiose claims, but you can often never use them.
AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and Waymo FSD are all released in the sense that you can see them actually working in the real world. Those all took much longer to put together than whatever rushed features were released to catch up with OpenAI, however.
They are also extremely constrained problem spaces relative to the problem space of LLMs, which is apparently "everything imaginable".
Waymo is not Google. And Deepmind operated quite independently until not long ago.