As The Dude once said... that's just, like, your opinion, man.
I'm confident that you have reasons for holding the position that you hold, but you're not actually offering anything beyond "if something different is possible in the future, one of the incumbents of today would have done it".
The simple fact is that OpenAI beat today's current players to market in every meaningful dimension, and we will have to agree to disagree that Google/Apple held back for fear of short-term PR blowback.
What is Apple but a company that prides themselves on doing things that everyone freaks out about, like ditching the floppy, CD-ROM, headphone jack?
All the companies in question have developed this technology internally, but found no way of making it PR-releasable. There's plenty of evidence to this effect: since MS/Fb/Gggl either have news stores about their internal products or have released one to massive negative PR.
They found no way of reliably making it non-racist, and reliably making it's "advice", "safe to trust", and so on.
What OpenAI "innovated" was an interface over an ensemble of techniques that managed to (1) provide an interface where "made-up" answers seem acceptable; and (2) severely censor and limit what users could do --- and massive teams of people modifying the system post-release to ensure it was robust to those uses.
A start-up has an asymmetric risk of bad PR compared to a tech giant; hence why they were the first to market. It doesnt matter if people exploit the system (etc.) since there's no brand perception wherein they're expected to somehow have prevented people from doing so.
Compare a small social network app with facebook. "Somehow" facebook is expected to have control over human nature to supernatural degrees, or else, "they're evil". Few other such companies are treated this way.
^ this is what stops tech giants releasing this stuff.
No one wants to be the "facebook of chatbots", somehow responsible for human nature, and somehow expected to create a perfect product which can somehow know everything except racism, sexism,etc.
I'm confident that you have reasons for holding the position that you hold, but you're not actually offering anything beyond "if something different is possible in the future, one of the incumbents of today would have done it".
The simple fact is that OpenAI beat today's current players to market in every meaningful dimension, and we will have to agree to disagree that Google/Apple held back for fear of short-term PR blowback.
What is Apple but a company that prides themselves on doing things that everyone freaks out about, like ditching the floppy, CD-ROM, headphone jack?