OpenAI Exec Confirms Google Built ChatGPT a Year Early But Shelved It
量子位 · wechat · 2026-08-03
Thibault Sottiaux, head of OpenAI Codex, confirmed that his former team at Google DeepMind developed a chatbot named LMChat, which was essentially ChatGPT a year earlier. However, Google executives shelved the project out of fear that LLMs would cannibalize their core search business.
Missing this opportunity has cost Google dearly, leading to severe brain drain recently. Noam Shazeer, co-author of the Transformer paper, and John Jumper, Nobel laureate and lead of AlphaFold, have both left Google for OpenAI and Anthropic respectively. The article compares Google's dilemma to Xerox PARC, highlighting how large companies often miss paradigm shifts to protect existing revenue streams.
Related event: Ex-Googlers Reveal ChatGPT-like Product Was Shelved Early(4 posts)→
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