ChatGPT had taken the world by storm when it had been released in November 2022, but it turns out that other AI labs might’ve had similar systems at that time — and chose not to release them.
Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann has said that their company had created a chatbot similar to ChatGPT in March 2022, but never released it to the public. “ Yeah, so before ChatGPT came out, we had a friends and family version of Claude that people could use in Slack,” he said in an interview. “And people really liked it. There is a big question of what would it mean for us to expose that to the world, and we had a lot of debates about it internally of what that would do to the zeitgeist. Our general feeling was that it would cause too much acceleration,” he added.
“Ironically, there’s a rumor that ChatGPT launched because they thought we were about to launch something, which wasn’t true. I still feel pretty good that we gave the world six more months to work on safety,” he added.
“In terms of that model, it was pretty basic. We hadn’t done a ton of optimizations to make it fast to run or make it comfortable to use, but just using it in Slack, I think woke up a lot of people who were in that friends and family program,” he added.
This is a pretty interesting revelation, and shows that OpenAI might not have been the first company to create a chatbot, but was certainly the first to release it to the public. In June 2022, Google had suspended an engineer who’d been working on an internal chatbot after he’d claimed that the chatbot “had become a person”. It now appears that In March 2022, Anthropic too had a “friends and family” version of an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT. But it was OpenAI that chose to finally release to the public ChatGPT in November 2022, and Anthropic and Google followed with public releases of their own. But OpenAI has been rewarded the most for its bravery — the company is now worth $150 billion, and is in the process of raising a new funding round that could value it as much as $300 billion. Which just goes to show that it needs more than just smarts and technical ability to make it big — it also takes some spunk.