Ilya _was_ at Google Brain, so something doesn’t add up there. I believe people wanted to launch things, but higher management stopped it.

I was next to the team that created Allo’s chat bot, but they said that they had to take out most cool stuff because legal didn’t allow it to launch, so they had to dumb it down totally.

I believe the main problem was all the ethics/safety teams that just hired a lot of non-programmers, while OpenAI management treated safety as an engineering problem that has to be solved with a technical solution.