OpenAI product lead Tibo Sottiaux said on X that he was part of a Google team that built an internal product called LMChat, which he described as essentially "ChatGPT one year before it came out." According to Sottiaux, the tool was never released because Google was too nervous to ship it, and DeepMind was blocked from launching products that could disrupt Google’s core search business. His comments came in response to a post by former Meta engineer Cheng Lou, who referenced remarks from Google chief scientist Jeff Dean saying Google had internal chatbots before ChatGPT launched, but did not think they were better than standard Google Search. The timeline outlined in the report links LMChat to Google’s broader work on conversational AI, including LaMDA in 2021 and Meena in 2020. The report also revisits Google’s rushed response after ChatGPT’s release. In February 2023, Google introduced Bard, but an error in a live demo was followed by an about $100 billion one-day drop in Alphabet’s market value. Two months later, Google merged Brain and DeepMind into Google DeepMind. Sottiaux later joined OpenAI in 2024, led work on Codex, and in 2026 became a core product leader overseeing both ChatGPT and Codex.