ChatGPT’s success could have come sooner, says former Google AI researcher

But it was really motivated by just an enormous, not only opportunity, but a moral obligation in a sense, to do something that was better done outside in order to design better medicines and have very direct impact on people’s lives.

Ars: The funny thing with ChatGPT is that I was using GPT-3 before that. So when ChatGPT came out, it wasn’t that big of a deal to some people who were familiar with the tech.

JU: Yeah, exactly. If you’ve used those things before, you could see the progression and you could extrapolate. When OpenAI developed the earliest GPTs with Alec Radford and those folks, we would talk about those things despite the fact that we weren’t at the same companies. And I’m sure there was this kind of excitement, how well-received the actual ChatGPT product would be by how many people, how fast. That still, I think, is something that I don’t think anybody really anticipated.

Ars: I didn’t either when I covered it. It felt like, “Oh, this is a chatbot hack of GPT-3 that feeds its context in a loop.” And I didn’t think it was a breakthrough moment at the time, but it was fascinating.

JU: There are different flavors of breakthroughs. It wasn’t a technological breakthrough. It was a breakthrough in the realization that at that level of capability, the technology had such high utility.

That, and the realization that, because you always have to take into account how your users actually use the tool that you create, and you might not anticipate how creative they would be in their ability to make use of it, how broad those use cases are, and so forth.

That is something you can sometimes only learn by putting something out there, which is also why it is so important to remain experiment-happy and to remain failure-happy. Because most of the time, it’s not going to work. But some of the time it’s going to work—and very, very rarely it’s going to work like [ChatGPT did].

Ars: You’ve got to take a risk. And Google didn’t have an appetite for taking risks?

JU: Not at that time. But if you think about it, if you look back, it’s actually really interesting. Google Translate, which I worked on for many years, was actually similar. When we first launched Google Translate, the very first versions, it was a party joke at best. And we took it from that to being something that was a truly useful tool in not that long of a period. Over the course of those years, the stuff that it sometimes output was so embarrassingly bad at times, but Google did it anyway because it was the right thing to try. But that was around 2008, 2009, 2010.