GPT is the product-ified version of text transformers, which OpenAI didn't invent or really even contribute to the discovery of.
The world changed with Attention is All You Need, and OpenAI was just an early adopter. The biggest thing OpenAI contributed to the broader industry was their API schema.
This sounds like the "acchhshually the iphone wasn't the first touchscreen phone, we had the motorola x34 vr34 t435 that did that one year before". Sure. Does anyone remember that phone? No? Well, the iphone changed the world.
The researcher in me appreciates you pointing that out. Still, the people who invented a technology often aren't the ones to make it widespread. The people who make it widespread deserve at least some of the credit, just like Apple got with Xerox's UI. https://blog.prototypr.io/how-xerox-invented-ux-ui-design-ap...