When you're a growth company, you innovate around issues. When you're a mega corp (like any FAANG) you buy someone who already did that. When AI becomes an issue, Google can just buy it out. The same applies to 1001 other imminent, world changing, breakthroughs (remember last year when we were all about to get quantum computers? Or everything was going onto the blockchain?). When you're small you are nimble, when you're big you just sort of steam-roller along.

As far as I can tell, this is just the corporate lifecycle. Congrats to Google on reaching middle age.