You misread.
There had been multiple LLM projects within FAIR for years. Some were open sourced as research prototypes (e.g. OPT175B, Galactica, BlenderBot...).
In mid-2022, FAIR started a large LLM project called Zetta, which was still going in late 2022 when ChatGPT came out.
A small group at FAIR-Paris was working on theorem proving. They needed an LLM for their own purpose and thought Zetta was too big and not ready.
They developed their own model, which eventually became Llama-1.
What happened internally between Zetta and Llama is somewhat similar to what just happened between DeepSeek and the big US players: a small team of talented folks innovated and beat the large teams.