even if Google had, it would have been of little value, since running Google, even back then, required a lot of computers and a lot of humans.
which is rather like Mistral - running large models is expensive, and hosting lets you amortise that across lots of users who individually use the model very little.
google ostensibly started on beige boxes, though. They used whatever computers they could get cheaply and quickly, even older hardware sufficed. There was a niche global group of people who could make stuff like that work as a much larger compute system (beowulf, etc). I don't know that it took "a lot of humans" to bootstrap.
which is rather like Mistral - running large models is expensive, and hosting lets you amortise that across lots of users who individually use the model very little.