It’s a common pattern that early usages of “GPT” reference BERT. I have not seen any counterexamples yet. e.g. Tweet (2018-10-12), Tweet (2018-10-12), Tweet (2018-10-13), Chinese blog post (2018-10-14), GitHub issue (2018-10-24), paper (2018-11-02), paper (2018-11-02), paper (2018-11-25), GitHub issue (2018-11-26).
The earliest mention of “OpenAI GPT” I found[1] is in the BERT paper by Google (
2018-10-11), which states:It’s a common pattern that early usages of “GPT” reference BERT. I have not seen any counterexamples yet.
e.g. Tweet (
2018-10-12), Tweet (2018-10-12), Tweet (2018-10-13), Chinese blog post (2018-10-14), GitHub issue (2018-10-24), paper (2018-11-02), paper (2018-11-02), paper (2018-11-25), GitHub issue (2018-11-26).The GPT-2 paper (
2019-02-14) later also cites BERT.My search strategies included: Searching Google, Twitter, first 30 PDFs from Cited By via Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar citations, alphaXiv Assistant, GPT-5.2-Thinking, GitHub, Grok 4.1, Claude Opus 4.5 Researcher, Manus 1.6 Lite, …