This was long before. Google had conversational LLMs before ChatGPT (though they weren’t as good in my recollection), and they declined to productize. There was a sense at the time that you couldn’t productize anything with truly open ended content generation because you couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t say something problematic.

See Facebook’s Galactica project for an example of what Google was afraid would happen: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063487/meta-lar...