iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Without the original ChatGPT accidentally tapping into the ELIZA effect, LLMs would have remained a curiosity, with extremely niche backend applications. But now we are living in the AI hype era, and any conversation about LLMs divorced from the parameters of the AI hype era is fanfiction.

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arestelle @arestelle.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Accidentally?

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

ChatGPT was a hastily thrown together tech demo. It was rapidly retooled into a product only after the unexpected success of the form factor, which made all the difference for the otherwise mediocre GPT-3 model.

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Mat G @gienieczko.com · 19/01/2026

At the beginning, OpenAI was a hodgepodge of researchers working on random "AI" flavoured things. From what I understand GPT-2 was a hastily put together tech demo tailored specifically to convince Bill Gates to let the OpenAI-Microsoft deal to go through. From "Empire of AI", Karen Hao, 71-72

Microsoft, meanwhile, continued to deliberate. Nadella, Scott, and other Microsoft executives were already on board with an initial investment. The one holdout was Bill Gates.

For Gates, Dota 2 wasn't all that exciting. Nor was he moved by robotics. The robotics team had created a demo of a robotic hand that had learned to solve a Rubik's Cube through its own trial and error, which had received universally favorable coverage. Gates didn't find it useful. He wanted an AI model that could digest books, grasp scientific concepts, and answer questions based on the material---to be an assistant for conducting research.

OpenAI had only one project that approached fitting the bill: a large language model called GPT-2 that was capable of generating passages of text that closely resembled human writing. (...)

GPT-2 wasn't even close to grasping scientific consepts, but the model could do some basic summarization of documents and sort of answer questions. Perhaps, some of OpenAI's researchers wondered, if they trained a larger model on more data and to perform tasks that at least looked more like what Gates wanted, they could sway him from being a detractor to being, at minimum, neutral. In April 2019, a small group of... [contd. on next page]

those researchers flew to Seattle to give what they called the Gates Demo of a souped-up GPT-2. By the end of it, Gates was indeed swayed just enough for the deal to go through.

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