> Wasn’t it used for that before anything else? Google invented transformers and had LLMs internally before chatgpt got released.

According to friends who worked at Google (no direct knowledge myself, so don't know exactly how true it is), they mostly sat on the tech. Google News had internal prototypes of using them to expand/contract/summarise and/or add details/context to news articles and translate them to different languages, but it was never fully productised.

Then after ChatGPT got popular, sudden panic to start using them in products company-wide.