According to Dynamic Beating monitoring, OpenAI's Product Lead Tibo Sottiaux said he worked on an internal chatbot called LMChat at Google DeepMind. This project existed about a year before the release of ChatGPT and had a product very similar to the later ChatGPT.
Google ultimately did not release it. Sottiaux said the company was concerned it would cannibalize existing business, and DeepMind couldn't launch a product that might threaten Google.
He had previously discussed this story in an interview with WIRED.
