In a seemingly coordinated nature, large corporations like Microsoft, Facebook and Google all released their LLMs and AI chatbots. Then nearly immediately after open-source versions came out, many in fact.
So what happened?
Were they always there and just waiting for the greenlight?
Or is it just a case of a 4-minute mile?
Google engineers actually created the technology (transformers[1]) which enabled these LLMs, but OpenAI simply released first.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(machine_learning_...
People get a really great new idea, all the smart people jump on it, the field is burned out in six months.
This revolution in science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization_group
didn't last long enough to finish grad school.
There's transparent evidence that transformer-based LLMs existed before ChatGPT or Llama. There was originally GPT-2, which was not a public release but did get reverse engineered into GPT-Neo and GPT-J (among others). Besides that, there was BERT and T5 from Google, Longformers, XLNet, and dozens of other LLMs that predate the modern ones.
> So what happened?
OpenAI reduced the friction of using AI to a Google login. Other models existed, but were largely not perceived as powerful enough to compete with a hosted solution. The combination of GPT-3's power and relatively-cheap usage fees is what drove it's adoption. Local AI solutions were being developed before OpenAI stepped into the arena, and are continuing to get developed. Many FAANG companies are heavily invested in the openness of AI architectures.
For a while it was largely academic and not crazy useful (GPT2ish era).
After this they had internal LLM's that could potentially be used to make products. This is where the companies split in their approaches. Google was overly cautious from what I've heard, they were concerned about "safety". Then openai released GPT3.5 and soon after GPT4. During this time Meta took the approach of just releasing their research model outright without first building it into a product. Google then scrambled to build products from their LLMs.
tl;dr - everyone of those are big players in the ML/AI space and had internally trained models for their research. We just recently crossed the line where these models became useful thus this scramble to release products (or the models themself).
EDIT: It's worth noting that the big breakthrough paper about transformers (Attention is All you Need) was released in 2017. People started scaling up the parameter count, optimizing training time, inference cost, etc. since then.
If chatgpt can steal eyeballs from google or facebook (something that Bing has tried with no success for the last 10 years), it is existential treat to google or facebook, so they must react.
The same thing would have happen with VR. As soon as some company will succeed with VR, your would suddenly see a lot of VR companies.