Actually Google were building and scaling transformers at same time as OpenAI - BERT (following Allen AI's ELMo), T5, Meena, LaMDA (chatbot - preceding ChatGPT

Actually Google were building and scaling transformers at same time as OpenAI - BERT (following Allen AI's ELMo), T5, Meena, LaMDA (chatbot - preceding ChatGPT by a year or two), PaLM ... It seems that Google really didn't know what to do with the tech, and hadn't figured out a way to control it (OpenAI's RLHF - critical for ChatGPT's success). It's a bit ironic that DeepMind were doing so much with RL, but Google Brain being separate at the time apparently were not consulting with them or tapping into their expertise.