OpenAI has produced an unsupervised language model that can do many tasks.

True: as of 2019-02-14, OpenAI had produced a language model trained without task-specific supervision (unsupervised or self-supervised pretraining on text) and showed it performing many different tasks, such as GPT-2, announced 14 February 2019 with zero-shot results on several tasks. Mostly true: such a model existed and did several tasks, but a minor detail was off (e.g. only a smaller version was released at that point). Mixed: the model existed but showed results on only a few tasks, or its training was substantially supervised. Mostly false: OpenAI had only a model that needed task-specific fine-tuning for each task, presented as doing many tasks unaided. False: no such OpenAI model existed as of that date.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Better language models and their implications - OpenAI OpenAI · 14 February 2019

   “We’ve trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization—all without task-specific training.”

2. E2 Better language models and their implications - OpenAI OpenAI · 14 February 2019

   “On other language tasks like question answering, reading comprehension, summarization, and translation, we are able to get surprising results without any fine-tuning of our models, simply by prompting the trained model in the right way”

3. E3 GPT-2 - Wikipedia Wikipedia · 8 December 2020

   “GPT-2 was first announced on 14 February 2019.”

4. E4 GPT-2 - Wikipedia Wikipedia · 8 December 2020

   “Despite this, GPT-2 achieved 5 BLEU on the WMT-14 English-to-French test set (slightly below the score of a translation via word-for-word substitution).”

OpenAI's GPT-2 announcement of 14 February 2019 describes a large-scale unsupervised language model. It says the model does reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering and summarization without task-specific training (E1), and that it got these results without fine-tuning, just by prompting (E2). Wikipedia, an independent source, confirms GPT-2 was announced on 14 February 2019, the date of the claim (E3). Wikipedia also notes that GPT-2's translation was weak (E4), but the claim is only that the model can do many tasks, not that it does them well, and the criteria's example for "true" describes GPT-2 exactly. The evidence shows that OpenAI had trained an unsupervised language model that performed several tasks without task-specific training [E1][E2]; no evidence item addresses which versions of the model were released.