Sadly, this is all that managers know to do: take a metric and try to optimize the heck out of it. They don't care about research, technology, "don't be evil", etc. And Google is run by managers now.
Expect Google models to be benchmaxxed as much as possible, but don't expect commensurate performance on real-world tasks.
Expect Google models to be benchmaxxed as much as possible, but don't expect commensurate performance on real-world tasks.