I guess the cost is worth it to Google just to entrench themselves and their products even further into the lives of most people.

They better have had traffic cones on their heads. The mental image that creates is quite funny with the contrast to the serious businesmen trying to sell AI one booth over.

IIRC Meta was one of the first companies to publicly release a language model that you could run on your computer, called llama. Hence the naming of projects like llama.cpp and ollama.