# @michael_nielsen — 2026-04-20

♥0 ↻0 · https://x.com/michael_nielsen/status/2046262213036671457

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!

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