When Brooks predicted in 2018 that something big would appear in AI, he did not know it would be LLMs.

True: Brooks's January 2018 predictions post (and his related 2018 writing) predicted that a major new AI development would emerge, without naming or describing large language models or transformer-based language models. Mostly true: the 2018 writing made such a prediction without naming LLMs, but the wording of that prediction differs somewhat from 'something big'. Mixed: the 2018 writing gestured vaguely at language or text models without singling them out. Mostly false: he did predict something big in 2018, but the writing pointed recognizably toward large-scale language models. False: his 2018 writing specifically predicted LLMs, or contained no prediction that something big would appear.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01 Rodney Brooks (rodneybrooks.com) · 1 January 2025 Own record

   “Whatever this turns out to be, it will be something that someone is already working on, and there are already published papers about it. There will be many claims on this title earlier than 2023, but none of them will pan out.”

2. E2 Predictions Scorecard, 2024 January 01 Rodney Brooks (rodneybrooks.com) · 1 January 2024 Own record

   “I just didn’t know what it would be; but I was quite sure that of the hundreds or thousands of AI projects that groups of people were already successfully working hard on, one would turn out to be that next big thing that everyone hopes is just around the corner.”

3. E3 Predictions Scorecard, 2024 January 01 Rodney Brooks (rodneybrooks.com) · 1 January 2024 Own record

   “I had predicted that the “next big thing” in AI, beyond deep learning, would show up no earlier than 2023, but certainly by 2027.”

4. E4 [FoR&AI] Steps Toward Super Intelligence I, How We Got Here Rodney Brooks (rodneybrooks.com) · 15 July 2018 Own record

   “But I am pretty confident that the things that will date my predictions are not yet known by most researchers, and certainly are not the hot topics of today.”

E4 is Brooks's own July 2018 essay. It says the developments that will date his predictions "are not yet known by most researchers" and are "not the hot topics of today", and it names no specific technology such as LLMs. E1 gives the prediction text as carried in his scorecard: something "someone is already working on" with "already published papers about it". It describes no particular approach, and E3 calls the predicted development the "next big thing" in AI beyond deep learning. All the evidence comes from Brooks himself and the full 2018 prediction text is not provided, so it is not certain that no 2018 passage points toward language models; the verdict is therefore mostly true rather than true.