Google reportedly built a ChatGPT equivalent a full year earlier than OpenAI, according to Tibo, Head of Codex at OpenAI, who said he was a member of that Google team at the time. The project was originally named LMChat and was "almost exactly a ChatGPT that came out a year earlier." Tibo said DeepMind did not have the authority to release it, and Google executives were so panicked about the LLM's potential impact on Google Search that they refused to give the final go-ahead. The revelation emerged after an engineer from Midjourney dug up an old interview with Jeff Dean, former head of Google Brain, who had mentioned an internal chatbot before ChatGPT but said it was "no better than just using Google Search directly." Tibo replied publicly, confirming the project's existence and explaining the decision. He added, "Alas, I think about this all the time." Netizens reacted with shock, with one comment saying, "Your former boss at Google should never be allowed to touch anything related to business ever again." Separately, Demis Hassabis, top leader of Google AI, mentioned in his biography that OpenAI made no disruptive innovations, and that Sam Altman was bold enough to ignore safety concerns and release directly. The article notes that Google's high baseline for Google Search, combined with LLM hallucinations in 2023, contributed to the decision, but that "Scaling has solved all these problems."