Most Google products even use flash lite underneath, so their frontier model is mostly used for distillation.
A good consideration; just one point from my side: as far as I am aware (but I may be wrong), Gemini is not known to perform well in an agentic framework.
This is no contradiction to your other claims, quite the opposite: perhaps (or even likely) Google wants to avoid that their models become a commodity in some (agentic?) application where the middleman who actually writes this application gets a disproportionate of the money that the customer of the application pays for it.
I used it for a month over the summer, right before they were going through the migration to antigravity. It was a fine workhorse IMO, no complaints from me.
I don't know , if it really finds all kinds of data center optimizations, quantum breakthroughs, helping make their workers smarter and more efficient - stuff an opensource model can't quite do - there's real economic value here no ? perhaps not worth dozens of billions but it could get there really fast.