Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) says Google was probably wrong to hold back its early LaMDA chatbot before ChatGPT. "The Google Brain side of it had a product, a very early one, it was called LaMDA in those days. And there'd been a conscious decision not to release that, and it was obviously in retrospect probably the wrong decision." "I wasn't involved in that because we were at the time just supposed to be working on research." "Those early language models, they were very interesting, but they were very flawed. Even today's ones, very impressive as they are, have things that we all know when we use the chatbots, they can't do very well. They make mistakes, they hallucinate, and those early ones were doing that a lot." "Google's known for accurate information. That's what Google is for... So I think it's sort of doubly tricky to think about putting out a bot that, you know, 20% of the time gives you the wrong information." "Whereas obviously a start-up, especially someone with someone like Sam leading it, you know, it's like, go for it, you only live once, YOLO it, and it's fine, right?" "So the thing that caught everyone by surprise, I would say, including them, was actually people finding use for even these early language models that, even though they had all of these flaws, you know, people still found, obviously, very creatively, once millions of people use it, oh, you can summarise things, can help with homework." "Do some brainstorming, it didn't matter if it made some errors, right? That weren't to do with information seeking. And these were new use cases that hadn't existed before." - Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind co-founder, in conversation with Sebastian Mallaby for Intelligence Squared, April 2026