In a fresh take on the AI race, Sundar Pichai said Google had already developed chatbot technology similar to ChatGPT before its public release, but chose not to launch it early.
Speaking on the Cheeky Pint podcast with John Collison, Pichai pointed to the 2022 LaMDA episode involving engineer Blake Lemoine. He said the internal system Lemoine interacted with was essentially an early version of a chatbot like ChatGPT.
“If you remember, there was an engineer inside who thought it was sentient. Think of it as an early version of ChatGPT he was speaking to, internally,” Pichai said. “We even had the product version of it in the multiverse, somewhere else. Google probably shipped that nine months later or something like that.”
Lemoine had publicly claimed LaMDA showed signs of sentience, sharing conversations that suggested emotions and self-awareness. Google dismissed these claims, and the wider AI community agreed the system was not conscious.
Pichai clarified that the decision to delay launch was not due to lack of capability, but product readiness. He noted that the internal version was “a lot more toxic at a level” and not sufficiently refined using reinforcement learning from human feedback.
He also referenced Google’s 2022 I/O event, where a limited version of LaMDA was introduced through an AI Test Kitchen, but it did not gain significant traction. In contrast, ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, went viral soon after its November 2022 launch.
“As a company which had this search quality bias, we had a higher bar, maybe, for what we thought was an acceptable product quality to go out,” Pichai said.
The rapid rise of ChatGPT reportedly triggered a “code red” inside Google, leading to accelerated AI efforts. The company launched Bard in early 2023, later rebranding it as Gemini.
Pichai now frames this period as a strategic decision rather than a missed opportunity, emphasising that Google had already built the core technology but chose to prioritise safety and quality before public release.
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