This may put it into perspective: Yann pushed for and released Galactica.org, a website that generated articles for any prompt requesting information, on 15 November, before the release of ChatGPT. Internal pressure inside Meta caused it to shut down three days later, because it was thought to risk the company’s reputation more than Libra and the Metaverse.

The issue isn’t that Yann didn’t publish an AI app; it is that they did, and it was not as good.

The reality is that OpenAI was lucky. Inside the company, there is an alignment department whose effort was driven to help models share human ethics, and that was initially a bit marginalized. However, one of their projects, RLHF, ended up producing a much superior language model, when they could have initially assumed it would be worse.