To me, the important quote was this:

> so a few dedicated nerds wanted to see how far we could get with that. In all honesty, we didn’t actually expect to get very far, but it was the height of a pandemic and we didn’t exactly have anything better to do.

Think about it: the pandemic caused many people to stop at the same time and for a long time. GPT-J took about 10 months to be released. It may not have been possible in a different context.