Nearly four years ago, OpenAI transformed the AI landscape with the launch of ChatGPT, a chatbot capable of holding remarkably human-like conversations. Its release prompted Google to accelerate its own AI efforts. However, according to OpenAI employee Thibault "Tibo" Sottiaux, who previously worked on Google's AI team, the company had already built a ChatGPT-like system long before OpenAI's breakthrough.
Sottiaux was responding to an X post by 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."
Replying to the post, Sottiaux revealed that he had been part of the team behind Google's internal chatbot.
"I was part of that team. Basically ChatGPT one year before it came out. Called LMChat and then another codename," he wrote.
GOOGLE CHOSE NOT TO RELEASE ITS CHATBOT
Sottiaux claimed that Google ultimately decided against launching the chatbot because it feared the product could disrupt its core search business.
"Google was too nervous to release it and DeepMind was blocked from shipping products that could disrupt Google," he wrote. "I think about this a lot."
Sottiaux left Google DeepMind in July 2024 before joining OpenAI.
Google is widely credited with laying the foundation for today's large language models through its landmark 2017 research paper, Attention Is All You Need, which introduced the Transformer architecture. The "T" in ChatGPT's GPT—Generative Pre-trained Transformer—comes from that breakthrough.
Despite pioneering the underlying technology, Google did not release a public chatbot at the time, allowing OpenAI to take the lead with ChatGPT. After its success, Google responded first with Bard before eventually launching Gemini.
Back in 2022, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean had said the company possessed AI capabilities comparable to OpenAI's but believed the risks associated with releasing such systems were greater because users expected highly reliable information from Google.
Speaking during an internal all-hands meeting, Dean reportedly said, "This really strikes a need that people seem to have but it's also important to realize these models have certain types of issues."
The company was particularly concerned about AI "hallucinations," where chatbots generate inaccurate or fabricated information instead of factual responses—a challenge that continues to affect AI models to varying degrees.
Before ChatGPT's arrival, Google was widely regarded as the leader in AI research through teams such as Google Brain, DeepMind and Google Research. It had developed advanced models including LaMDA, PaLM and Meena.
According to reports, however, many of these systems remained internal or were not fully integrated into Google's consumer products due to concerns over safety, accuracy and the potential impact on its search business.
OpenAI's launch dramatically changed the competitive landscape. ChatGPT reached one million users within five days and crossed 100 million users in just two months. Today, ChatGPT has around one billion monthly active users, while Google's Gemini has nearly 950 million.
Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are now considered among the leading companies developing the world's most advanced AI models.
Discussions around Google's decision not to release its chatbot have resurfaced multiple times online. Had the company launched its own conversational AI earlier, many believe OpenAI may not have achieved the same level of attention and momentum with ChatGPT.
