Renowned computer scientist Jeff Dean revealed that Google had built a ChatGPT-style artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot a year before OpenAI released its own, but its leadership did not release it publicly for two reasons.
Dean, who led Google's AI division till 2023 before moving into the chief scientist role, announced on Wednesday that he would leave the company after 27 years.
In a podcast video that surfaced online after his departure, Dean is heard saying that Google had internally built a ChatGPT-style chatbot before OpenAI, which he said employees used during the pandemic.
“We had an internal chatbot system that Googlers used to play with even before ChatGPT came out. Actually, during the pandemic lockdown, Googlers would enjoy chatting with it during lunch because it was a nice partner,” he said in the video.
Dean said that the chatbot model didn't always get things right from the search perspective and had some safety issues, including sometimes saying offensive things, so it wasn't publicly released.
{{/usCountry}}Dean said that the chatbot model didn't always get things right from the search perspective and had some safety issues, including sometimes saying offensive things, so it wasn't publicly released.
{{/usCountry}}“We didn't quite appreciate how useful they could be for things you wouldn't ask a search engine. Like, help me write a note or take this stack and give a quick summary of it. That's the kind of thing we have seen people flock to in terms of using chatbots,” he added.
Who is Jeff Dean?
Jeff Dean is a renowned American computer scientist and software engineer who spent 27 years helping build core infrastructure at Google. He co-founded Google Brain, led Google AI, and served as Google's Chief Scientist before leaving in 2026 to co-found the AI start-up Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat.
Discovery Loop is built as a public benefit corporation to use AI for automating scientific and engineering experiments.
While at Google, Dean co-created foundational, scalable systems such as MapReduce, Bigtable, and Spanner. He co-designed and implemented TensorFlow and led the development of Google's TPU hardware acceleration program.
Dean also contributed to early versions of AdSense, Google News, and large-scale distributed neural network training.