That is a common narrative but Google had LaMDA as an LLM with over 100B parameters before the ChatGPT release. There was even a Xoogler that claimed it was alive.
From my POV Google could have released a good B2C LLM before OpenAI, but it would compete with their own Ads business.
True, actually people forget that quite good LLMs existed 2-3 years before ChatGPT, from Google, Microsoft, Facebook… OpenAI itself open-sourced GPT-2 all the way back in 2019 and had a GPT-3 API service for years before ChatGPT.
The breakthrough that ChatGPT brought was not technical, but the foresight to bet on laborious human-feedback fine-tuning to make LLMs somewhat controllable and practical. All those previous LLMs where mostly as “intelligent” as the GPT-3.5 that ChatGPT was built on, but they hallucinated so much, and it was so easy to manipulate them to be horribly racist and such. They remained niche tech demos until OpenAI trained them, not with new tech really, just the right vision and lots of expensive experimentation.
From my POV Google could have released a good B2C LLM before OpenAI, but it would compete with their own Ads business.