Their unreleased LaMDA[1] famously caused one of their own engineers to have a public crashout in 2022, before ChatGPT dropped. Pre-ChatGPT they also showed it off in their research blog[2] and showed it doing very ChatGPT-like things and they alluded to 'risks,' but those were primarily around it using naughty language or spreading misinformation.

I think they were worried that releasing a product like ChatGPT only had downside risks for them, because it might mess up their money printing operation over in advertising by doing slurs and swears. Those sweet summer children: little did they know they could run an operation with a seig-heiling CEO who uses LLMs to manufacture and distribute CSAM worldwide, and it wouldn't make above-the-fold news.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims

[2] https://research.google/blog/lamda-towards-safe-grounded-and...

Attention is all you need was written by Googlers IIRC.