Not to mention Google never paraded itself around as a non-profit acting in the best interests of humanity.
Just throwing this out there, but maybe … non-profits shouldn't be considered holier-than-thou, just because they are “non-profits”.
Profit is now a dirty word somehow, the idea being that it's a perverse incentive. I don't believe that's true. Profit is the one incentive businesses have that's candid and the least perverse. All other incentives lead to concentrating power without being beholden to the free market, via monopoly, regulations, etc.
The most ethically defensible LLM-related work right now is done by Meta/Facebook, because their work is more open to scrutiny. And the non-profit AI doomers are against developing LLMs in the open. Don't you find it curious?
There's nothing wrong with running a perfectly good car wash, but you shouldn't be shocked if people are mad when you advertise it as an all you can eat buffet and they come out soaked and hungry.
not sure what event you're thinking of, but Google was a public company before 10 years and they started their first ad program just barely more than a year after forming as a company in 1998.
I consider Google to have been a reasonably benevolent corporate citizen for a good time after they were listed (compare with, say, Microsoft, who were the stereotypical "bad company" throughout the 90s). It was probably around the time of the Google+ failure that things slowly started to go downhill.
[0] a non-profit supposedly acting in the best interests of humanity, though? That's insidious.