---
id: "2020-05-28-gpt-3"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-05-28-gpt-3/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2020-05-28"
date_precision: day
category: model-release
importance: 5
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-05-28-gpt-3/

# GPT-3 (175B) shows in-context few-shot learning

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

## What happened

GPT-3 demonstrated that scale alone yielded 'in-context learning' across translation, QA, arithmetic and writing.

## Why it matters

Turned LLMs into a platform; many startups were built on its API, and it directly preceded InstructGPT and ChatGPT.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165) (arxiv.org, paper)
2. [OpenAI API (OpenAI)](https://openai.com/index/openai-api/) (openai.com, official)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2022-11-30: [OpenAI launches ChatGPT](https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-11-30-chatgpt/index.md)
- 2022-01-27: [InstructGPT: RLHF aligns language models to follow instructions](https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-01-27-instructgpt/index.md)
- 2020-01-23: [OpenAI publishes 'Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models'](https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-01-23-scaling-laws/index.md)