If I recall right, GPT4 got done in October. After that, it was RLHF and safety work (Bing starts using GPT4 publicly in February, a month earlier than official launch)
Ultimately though, it's futile to argue which model got done first, as long as the models were behind closed doors. But ChatGPT launched before Bard did and that's the pertinent part that gave OpenAI the first-mover advantage.
It's outputs non-sensical (aka highly hallucinating) or relatively useless but coherent text.
It really needs further refinement.
This is one big reason why GPT-4 is still the most popular.
No. A lot of people think it really matters
A lot of other people pretend to care about it because it also enables stifling the competition and attempting regulatory capture. But it's not all of them.
What makes you think it is for show?