@michael_nielsen 2026-04-20 ♥0 ↻0 original ↗
Fun bet from 2020 on the future of LLM models. At some level it's obvious @arram won overwhelmingly, and apparently @robinhanson conceded, so no judgement needed

It's fun to attempt a contrarian case that Robin won - modern systems use many ideas not present in GPT-3, including ideas like instruction tuning, multimodal training, RLVR, chain-of-thought, and much else. You could argue these aren't really "GPT-3-like models" anymore. But everyone I've met at the frontier labs clearly regards modern models as descendants, and so it seems a bit like arguing that automobiles in the 1950s no longer deserved to be called automobiles, for a bet made in 1920. It'd just be wrong

On the other side: OpenAI crossed $1 billion in revenue in 2023, and last year they were at $20b ARR. Anthropic: $14b ARR by Feb 2026. Add in Gemini, Cursor, Copilot, etc etc etc...

Obviously Arram won overwhelmingly! Congrats to Arram for winning, to Robin for participating, to @tylercowen for the provocation, and @simonsarris for the reminder!
photo

author:michael_nielsen has-image kind:image kind:tweet model:gpt-3 thread-context year:2026

Reproduced against link rot, credited and linked to its original. Yours and you’d rather it weren’t here? Open an issue.