LaMDA was ready before ChatGPT but remained in the shadows

The history of massive technological missed opportunities has been supplemented with a new epic case. Mustafa Suleyman, who now heads artificial intelligence at Microsoft, revealed an interesting fact. It turns out Google had its own version of ChatGPT long before OpenAI presented its product to the world.

The project called LaMDA was completely ready for launch. According to Suleyman, who then worked at Google DeepMind, it was a full conversational language model with cool capabilities. All Google employees tested it and saw the potential.

But a split occurred within the company. One part of the team enthusiastically supported the project. Understanding that this was the future of search technologies. The other half showed extreme skepticism. Expressing concerns about safety, possible model hallucinations and potential threat to Google’s main search business.

As a result, while internal debates continued at Google, OpenAI released ChatGPT. And accomplished a real revolution in the technology world. Now Google is trying to catch up on what was missed by integrating its Gemini model everywhere possible.

It turns out the company that once revolutionized the internet with its search was afraid to change it again for fear of losing revenue from that same search.