I remember reading that someone who worked in machine learning was saying that Google's reluctance to release software is causing them to be the company that's trained an entire generation of machine learning engineers who went on to other companies to make great things.

This is certainly an example of that type of thinking. They're scared to innovate because they're more interested in protecting themselves from legal exposure than in pushing the technology. So the engineers that are passionate about creating new things are just going to new fast moving startups and this leaves Google playing catchup.

It's just a really good cover band.