But Google actually knows how to do research and how to apply it to products. Meta's AI research hasn't produced anywhere near as many state of the art products /revolutionary achievements.
I have seen basically no evidence of this. Google knows how to do research to create technology. Google is pretty terrible at creating product though.
To the point it was a running joke at MSR.
Meta spends a lot of money on AI research with little to show for it. As imperfect as Google may be, they're still doing much better.
Both GCP and Gemini are products of this. Modern cloud was arguably built by Google (think Chubby, GFS, Bigtable as building blocks) - they just spent 10 years ceding it to Amazon before competing.