I'll try to resolve this by following along with Max Bittker's "New New York Times" bluesky (formerly twitter) bot. If this bot stops working for any reason, I'll try to resolve answers manually. The ultimate truth lies in whether this is used in an official NYT article rather than whether a bot identifies it, of course.
Words must be spelled exactly the same in this market as in the NYT for it to count, aside from punctuation and letter case. Hyphenated words are allowed, plus the hyphen counts as punctuation, so a hyphenated word will resolve a non-hyphenated corresponding market and vice versa. Phrases of 2 or more words (non-hyphenated) don't count. Names and abbreviations do count.
If you're curious about whether a word is eligible to submit, you can use https://www.nytimes.com/search/ to check. Put the word in quotes. This appears to go back to 1851, so I really mean for the first time ever.
Words used for the first time ever will resolve YES, eligible words that haven't been used by 2030 will resolve NO, and ineligible entries (already used in the past or disqualified at my discretion) will resolve N/A.
Related questions
@horse Hmm good question. Both seem fair to me — really I think any unbroken string of characters should count (as per xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx). However I don't think names show up on the bot that I'll be monitoring, so I might not catch it right away. I'll eventually search all the answers in the market to see if they showed up though.
@TylerJohnston The bot filters out anything that's capitalized, so both of those will probably be caught
Fun fact: GPT-5, GPT-6, and GPT-7 have all already appeared in the Times.