Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Nearly four years ago, OpenAI shook the world with ChatGPT – an AI chatbot that could talk to you in a way that we had never seen before. Google had to play catch up following ChatGPT’s release as it scrambled to get a piece of this AI pie. But according to OpenAI’s Thibault ‘Tibo’ Sottiaux, who was part of Google’s AI team before, Google could’ve enjoyed an advantage all along.
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Tibo replied to a post on X from AI engineer Cheng Lou who wrote, “I sometimes think about that Jeff Dean interview where he said they had an internal bot before ChatGPT but didn’t think it was better than just googling.”
Tibo who worked at Google before joining OpenAI revealed that Google had its own ChatGPT almost a year before OpenAI released it “I was part of that team. Basically ChatGPT one year before it came out. Called LMChat and then another codename,” he wrote.
Google blocked AI chatbot release
The OpenAI employee claimed that Google was worried that a chatbot could hamper its search business and decided to block the release. “Google was too nervous to release it and DeepMind was blocked from shipping products that could disrupt Google,” Tibo added. “I think about this a lot.”
Thibault ‘Tibo’ Sottiaux left Google DeepMind in July 2024 to join OpenAI.
You see, Google fundamentally created the architecture of a large language model (LLM) that we use today with its 2017 paper, “Attention is All You Need.” Simply put, Google developed the Transformer architecture that puts the T in ChatGPT – GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. But Google decided not to release its chatbot back in the day, and OpenAI beat them to it.
Though after the release of ChatGPT, Google found itself playing catchup, initially with AI model Bard, before releasing Gemini.
Back in 2022, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean said Google had similar capabilities to OpenAI, but the risks of getting things wrong were greater because users had to trust the answers they received from Google.
Dean said in an all-hands meeting back then, “This really strikes a need that people seem to have but it’s also important to realize these models have certain types of issues.” That is, the company claimed that it was worried about hallucinations – where an AI chatbot may make up information instead of relying on facts – something which remains a problem to some extent even today.
Before ChatGPT though, Google was widely seen as the leading AI company, with Google Brain, DeepMind and Google Research driving work in the field. The company had the research, infrastructure and talent, and had developed models such as LaMDA, PaLM and Meena.
As per reports, these systems were kept internal or were not fully integrated into Google’s product suite, with concerns around accuracy, safety and the risk of disrupting its search business.
OpenAI’s launch changed the pace of the market. ChatGPT reached one million users in five days and 100 million in two months. Today, ChatGPT has about 1 billion monthly active users, with Google’s Gemini nearly 950 million. Google and OpenAI are at the frontier of AI development alongside Anthropic when it comes to building the most advanced AI models out there.
This is not the first time that discussions about Google’s decision not to release its chatbot have gone viral online. Though if Google had decided to release its chatbot, it is possible that OpenAI may not have gained the same level of attention it did.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
