A former Google researcher behind a seminal AI paper describes how the company lost a top chatbot visionary

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Abstraction: Google's reputational caution caused it to miss chatbot opportunity

Key points:

Noam Shazeer, lead author of the original Transformer paper and co-founder of Character.ai, says Google had chatbot technology ready years before ChatGPT
Daniel De Freitas built Meena (later renamed LaMDA) as a 20% project starting 2016; Google refused to release it publicly due to reputational risk
Character.ai raised ~$200M and allows users to converse with AI personas mimicking celebrities and archetypes
Google prioritized defensive reputational concerns over product launches while OpenAI's ChatGPT triggered the AI race
LaMDA controversy (Blake Lemoine sentience claim, Timnit Gebru warnings) reinforced Google's reluctance to release chatbots
By 2023 Google was racing to release Bard and deprioritizing AI ethics concerns as Microsoft/OpenAI threatened search market share

Connections: Google · Character AI · Noam Shazeer · Google Brain · Chatgpt · Large Language Models · Chatbots