{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-05-28-gpt-3/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-05-28-gpt-3/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"human editor","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"2020-05-28-gpt-3","date":"2020-05-28","date_precision":"day","short_title":"GPT-3 (175B) shows in-context few-shot learning","deck":null,"takeaway":"OpenAI's 175-billion-parameter GPT-3 could perform new tasks from a few examples in its prompt, without fine-tuning; it was offered via the OpenAI API from June 2020.","category":"model-release","category_label":"Model releases","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (arXiv)","url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165","type":"paper","group":"primary","domain":"arxiv.org"},{"n":2,"title":"OpenAI API (OpenAI)","url":"https://openai.com/index/openai-api/","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"openai.com"}],"official":2,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI"],"title":"GPT-3 (175B) shows in-context few-shot learning","summary":"OpenAI's 175-billion-parameter GPT-3 could perform new tasks from a few examples in its prompt, without fine-tuning; it was offered via the OpenAI API from June 2020.","key_facts":["Paper 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners', arXiv 2005.14165 (28 May 2020)","175 billion parameters, ~10x larger than any previous dense LM","Trained on ~300B tokens","OpenAI API launched in private beta on 11 June 2020","NeurIPS 2020 best paper award"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["llm","gpt","few-shot","api"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nGPT-3 demonstrated that scale alone yielded 'in-context learning' across translation, QA, arithmetic and writing.\n\n## Why it matters\n\nTurned LLMs into a platform; many startups were built on its API, and it directly preceded InstructGPT and ChatGPT.","disputed":[],"related":[{"id":"2022-11-30-chatgpt","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-11-30-chatgpt/","date":"2022-11-30","date_precision":"day","short_title":"OpenAI launches ChatGPT","deck":null,"takeaway":"The moment AI became a mass-market technology — the start of the current era of AI investment, adoption and policy attention.","category":"product","category_label":"Products","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":2,"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI"]},{"id":"2022-01-27-instructgpt","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-01-27-instructgpt/","date":"2022-01-27","date_precision":"day","short_title":"InstructGPT: RLHF aligns language models to follow instructions","deck":null,"takeaway":"RLHF turned raw LLMs into usable assistants and underlies ChatGPT, Claude and nearly all chat models.","category":"research","category_label":"Research","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":3,"official":3,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI"]},{"id":"2020-01-23-scaling-laws","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-01-23-scaling-laws/","date":"2020-01-23","date_precision":"day","short_title":"OpenAI publishes 'Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models'","deck":null,"takeaway":"Scaling laws became the strategic basis for the trillion-dollar compute build-out of the 2020s.","category":"research","category_label":"Research","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":2,"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI"]}],"people":[],"posts":[],"videos":[],"models":[],"changes":[{"date":"2026-09-29","type":"filed","text":"Created"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-09-29","run":null,"sources_read":null,"updated":"2026-09-29","human_review":null,"version":{"date":"2026-10-04"}},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"gemini-4-hydrogen","name":"Gemini 4 Hydrogen","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true}],"short_url":"https://postcutoff.com/s/gpt-3-175b-shows-in-context"}