Thibault Sottiaux, head of engineering for OpenAI Codex, previously worked at Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence lab for six years, where he researched projects involving AI infrastructure, machine learning engineering, and more.
Today, Thibault revealed on X that DeepMind had built a similar product a year before ChatGPT was released. It was called LMChat at the time and was later given different internal codenames.
However, the product was ultimately never released. The reason was that the company was concerned it might compete with Google Search, so it remained shelved. Google also had a policy that DeepMind could not release products that might “disrupt Google's existing businesses.”
Google employee Jeff Dean once said that Google had developed a chatbot before ChatGPT was released, but the company internally believed that the product was no better than Google Search, so it was never launched.