The surprise was not that they existed: There were chatbots in Google way before ChatGPT. What surprised them was the demand, despite all the problems the chatbots have. The pig problem with LLMs was not that they could do nothing, but how to turn them into products that made good money. Even people in openAI were surprised about what happened.

In many ways, turning tech into products that are useful, good, and don't make life hell is a more interesting issue of our times than the core research itself. We probably want to avoid the valuing capturing platform problem, as otherwise we'll end up seeing governments using ham fisted tools to punish winners in ways that aren't helpful either

ChatGPT really innovated on making the chat not say racist things that the press could report on. Other efforts before this failed for that reason.

Well, I must say ChatGPT felt much more stable than Meena when I first tried it. But, as you said, it was a few years before ChatGPT was publicly announced :)