Whatpu, the modern (and NOT Greek!) mythological character

Search the web for examples of one-shot prompts and you are almost always likely to some example that mentions a creature called "Whatpu" !

It was originally used in a 2020 paper "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners" to demonstrate one-shot learning on a GPT-3 model. They demonstrated that given one example, not covered in training data, the model can infer an answer on another example, also not covered in training data. 

Their  prompt was: 

A "whatpu" is a small, furry animal native to Tanzania. An example of a sentence that uses the word whatpu is:

We were traveling in Africa and we saw these very cute whatpus.

 To do a "farduddle" means to jump up and down really fast. An example of a sentence that uses the word farduddle is:

And tbe answer given by the model was: 

When we won the game, we all started to farduddle in celebration.

Since whatpu and farduddle were the words not known to internet (at that time!), this proved the model's capability of thinking. 

The tradition of creating and using meaningless words is not new to English. This has been done in past history also and will continue to be done. A classic example of this is Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky". 

While meaningless words are not new in English, and mythological creatures are not new to the world since the times of ancient Greeks, this example has given the world a new mythological creature after a long time!