[uejfiweun]

Google screwed up so massively in this whole AI race. It blows my mind that they had the technology available internally years before OpenAI released ChatGPT but didn't do anything with it and in fact lost top talent due to their hesitation to release it (as the article states about Noam Shazeer). And now, for basically every non-techie person, ChatGPT is synonymous with AI in the same way that Google was synonymous with search. What a disaster. Quite frankly shocked that their executive team is still in place.

[matusp]

To be honest there were several chatbots before ChatGPT, eg Galactica by Microsoft, and it had not seem so promising. Similarly, ChatGPT was originally released as more or less a fun little demo, and the absolute success was surprise for OpenAI as well .

They probably managed to hit certain UX threshold where people start to find the chatting valuable/interesting, but this was really an accidental discovery.

[kridsdale1]

Sometimes virality is a total fluke of the moment. For instance Zoom happened to be what teachers told each other about when lockdowns started.

That could have been webx or meet or whatever.

[benatkin]

Guess they didn't need that top talent in the long run, they had plenty of their own top talent

https://polymarket.com/event/which-company-has-best-ai-model...

[DSingularity]

Maybe this “screw up” delayed LLMs by years and gave them more years to milk the cow.