Agreed. For Google, this is a matter of life or death. Google will give everything they have to win this war. There may be a chance if Microsoft buys open AI outright. The final battle is between Google and Microsoft.
Discussion
It will be worth watching the open source projects like mosaicML. The tools in open source are taking off like crazy speed and great innovation. Check the models on huggingface I am blown away by some of the models you can deploy on your laptop within hours.
I was listening to an interview with Max Tegmark and according to him the big breakthroughs may not necessarily depend on a large budget so even an open source dataset / models can achieve them.