A few possible theories, some might be mutually exclusive: Organizational scar tissue making them more risk averse about the PR risks of letting the genpop use

A few possible theories, some might be mutually exclusive: Organizational scar tissue making them more risk averse about the PR risks of letting the genpop use AI generation tools, and create something offensive. With the safe assumption that Google will get blamed, not the user. Fear of government regulation on AI if they don't self-regulate. No need to actually release it, since this isn't the core business but just research. (While openai needs to actually create the business.) Corollary: more to lose -- a scandal around offensive content will not hurt openai's non-existent other businessess. It might make some advertisers pull their ads from Google. The opportunity cost of building a self serve platform is too high. (Can't pull in people writing those kind of apps from projects with more commercial importance. Can't make the ML researchers do that.) They misjudged how much demand there would be, and thought that building a platform would not be useful for a few years. And if it now turns out to actually be a great business it'll now take them a year to productionize and build a platform. Their compute requirements are so high that selling access is not viable, the costs are prohibitive for real users. It's not that different from e.g. self driving cars. Pretty obviously they had better tech from early on, but were not willing to take the risks that Tesla was.