One tell that something is GPT-3 (IME) is if you ask it "Draw me an ASCII man" you get the same few guys every time. I couldn't get this service to generate them.
Not GPT-3. I believe it's a bunch of ex-Googlers who worked on their large language models.
You're right, it seems to be "LaMDA" (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08239 ). The three first authors are part of the Character.ai team.
If they are ex-Google now then presumably they had to train a new alternative to LaMBDA from scratch.