[hansworst]

Arguably Google is the company that triggered that paradigm shift by publicly sharing (some of) their work on AI like the transformer/attention paper. So if anything they were ahead of the curve in terms of research. They're also extremely well positioned in terms of training data, infrastructure capabilities, hardware (TPUs), they had the first popular machine learning library (TensorFlow), etc.

Lately you could argue they're being overtaken by their competitors, especially in terms of productization. But they still hold pretty cards IMO.