When they tested the original GPT-4, under far less dangerous circumstances, for months.
My impression is that it’s the product-relevant post-training effort for GPT-4 that took months, the fact that there was also safety testing in the meantime is incidental rather than the cause of it taking months. This claim gets repeated, but I’m not aware of a reason to attribute the gap between Aug 2022 end of pretraining (if I recall the rumors or possibly claims by developers correctly) and Mar 2023 release to safety testing rather than to getting post-training right (in ways that are not specifically about safety).
My impression is that it’s the product-relevant post-training effort for GPT-4 that took months, the fact that there was also safety testing in the meantime is incidental rather than the cause of it taking months. This claim gets repeated, but I’m not aware of a reason to attribute the gap between Aug 2022 end of pretraining (if I recall the rumors or possibly claims by developers correctly) and Mar 2023 release to safety testing rather than to getting post-training right (in ways that are not specifically about safety).