All of these companies know the tech isn't ready, but they couldn't afford to be left behind when someone moved. It's funny, because this happens quite often in tech. Remember when Tesla announced self-driving? Suddenly Intel were doing deals with MobilEye and BMW, GM did Cruise etc. etc. and then 5-10 years later nothing has been delivered? They all jumped the gun and couldn't afford ot be left behind.
If you are ok with a higher degree of inaccuracy in exchange for minimizing your efford by a lot, ChatGPT is a game changer for many people.
1. The former is entirely in software and has the favorable economics that brings with it
2. Language models don't need to be that good to provide value, whereas self-driving cars basically need to be solved before they become significantly useful
3. There's a cottage industry of secondary startups being built around using language models for various applications, whereas no such thing exists for self-driving (probably because of 2)
You still need data labelling, which is not done by software and which is quite difficult to scale up and to carry out in a consistent manner. I know that most probably there are self-learning LLM models that would partly alleviate that issue, but (absent AGI) I don't think that they'll really solve the problem going forward.
And now, Google who didn't have any intention of releasing LaMDA, panicked..