The funniest thing I've seen on this is the ChatGPT CEO, Altman, talking about how he's a bit afraid of what they've created and how it needs limitations -- and then when the EU begins to look at regulations, he immediately rejects the concept, to the point of threatening to leave the European market. It's incredibly transparent what they're doing.
Unfortunately I don't know enough about the technology to say if the algorithms and concepts themselves are novel, but without a doubt they couldn't exist without modern computing power capabilities.