Can AI summarize history in ONE word? I asked LLMs to describe each year from 1990 to 2020. The results are fascinating! See how LLMs "think" about our past. Which LLMs resonate most with you own views?

There are no results for “Think of one word and one word only”

AI generated image, any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

Can you imagine that there are still some online search queries in Google, Bing and Yahoo that return no results? It’s hard to believe, but I argue that there is still a vast opportunity for genuine (human) creativity and new discoveries despite all the vast amounts of data on the Internet and the flood of synthetic and AI-generated data online.

My own searches usually return plenty of results since I tend to look for common topics. But this time, especially with this week’s release of Grok 3 and R1-1776, I wanted to try out something new.

I asked each LLM for one word and one word only to describe a year. I chose the period from 1990 to 2020 because it covers most of my own (more or less) conscious life before COVID.

Enjoy this journey through 30 years of human history, as seen through the “eyes” of LLMs:

1990s

2000s

2010s

You probably noticed that all LLMs, except Grok 3, gave occasionally more than one word, though they related to a single concept. Imho, above tables really tell how differently LLMs “think” and “feel” about our history.

Fun fact, more recently all LLMs tend to mostly agree on the same word every 6 or 7 years😉

What do you think? Which LLMs resonate with you? What one word would you choose for your most memorable year? Drop your comment below.

This article was written for fun, please do not judge. Instead, please share your comments in a constructive and respectful manner. The author and AI remain innocent until proven guilty.

Abbreviations: LLMs refer to both large language models and large thinking (reasoning) models.

AI tools used: Grok 2 and Grok 3 by xAI, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental by Google, le Chat by Mistral AI, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B by DeepSeek and R1-1776 by Perplexity.