Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36134249

by behnamoh • 3 years ago

947 689 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It is much faster than before but the quality of its responses is more like a GPT-3.5++. It generates more buggy code, the answers have less depth and analysis to them, and overall it feels much worse than before.

For a while, the GPT-4 on phind.com gave even better results than GPT-4-powered ChatGPT. I could notice the difference in speed of both GPT-4s. Phind's was slower and more accurate. I say "was" because apparently phind is now trying to use GPT-3.5 and their own Phind model more frequently, so much for GPT-4 powered search engine....

I wonder if I use Poe's GPT-4, maybe I'll get the good old GPT-4 back?

arthurcolle• 3 years ago

Do you have an example question/answer?

okdood642• 3 years ago

Yes!

It didn't even try on my question of Jarvis standings desks, which is a fairly old product that hasn't changed up.. Their typical "My knowledge cutoff..." response doesn't even make sense. It screwed up another question I asked it about server uptime and four-9s, Bard got it right.

I've moved back to Bard for the time being...It's way faster as well. And GPT-4's knowledge cutoff thing is getting old fast.

Example prompt: how much does a 48 x 30 inch jarvis bamboo standing desk setup weigh?

I still have the spec sheet from my order back in 2020. So I can verify the weights.

### GPT-4 ###

ChatGPT As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, I don't have the exact weight of a 48 x 30 inch Jarvis Bamboo standing desk setup. However, on average, standing desks can range anywhere from around 60 to 100 pounds or more, depending on the specific configuration (like the choice of frame, desktop material, and any additional features).

Jarvis Bamboo standing desks are made of a bamboo top and an electric lift frame. The weight of the bamboo top for that size should be around 30-40 pounds. The frame itself can weigh anywhere from 50-70 pounds.

For a more accurate weight, I would recommend checking the manufacturer's specifications on their website or contacting their customer support directly for this information.

### Bard ###

The fully assembled Jarvis Bamboo Standing Desk weighs 92 pounds. The desktop itself weighs 38 pounds, and the frame weighs 54 pounds. The desk can hold a maximum weight of 350 pounds.

Here are some of the features of the Jarvis Bamboo Standing Desk:

Electric height adjustment from 25.5 to 51 inches Memory presets for up to 4 different heights 3-stage gas spring mechanism Bamboo desktop with a scratch-resistant finish Black powder-coated steel frame 10-year warranty on the frame and 5-year warranty on the desktop

chx• 3 years ago

Asking facts from a generative AI is folly.

wmeddie• 3 years ago

Yes, people really need to know that unless you are using the browser plugin, you really shouldn't ask it questions like this. (A good rule of thumb I think is if you can't expect a random person on the street to get the question right without looking it up, you shouldn't expect GPT-4 to get it right either.)

Unfortunately for this question, even using the browser plugin it wasn't able to get the answer: https://chat.openai.com/share/6344f09e-4ba0-45c7-b455-7be59d...

DebtDeflation• 3 years ago

Even worse is all of the "GPT Influencers" and their "Here's what ChatGPT predicts will be the price of Bitcoin/some stock/houses will be this time next year" clickbait. It's a language model, people.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 3 years ago

Were the numbers accurate or hallucinated?

dotancohen• 3 years ago

  > The fully assembled Jarvis Bamboo Standing Desk weighs 92 pounds. The desktop itself weighs 38 pounds, and the frame weighs 54 pounds. The desk can hold a maximum weight of 350 pounds.

That sounds like a linguistically valid sentences, exactly what I would expect from a novel LLM. Did you check that it is also factually correct? Factually correctness is _not_ the goal of a typical LLM.

CGamesPlay• 3 years ago

According to https://ukstore.hermanmiller.com/products/jarvis-bamboo-desk... Bard is off by about 10%, but generally correct (it's also possible that the US dimensions are actually smaller and could account for the difference).

skilled• 3 years ago

It’s possible they are trying out a shaved/turbo version so that they can start removing the limits. I mean as it is - 25 messages every 3 hours is useless, particularly for browsing and plugins.

gettodachoppa• 3 years ago

That would be a shame. I would rather be limited to 25 quality responses per 3 hours than an unlimited inferior GPT4.

Imagine trading the advice of a senior mentor for 5 intermediate mentors. Yes, the answers get to you faster, but it's much less useful.

allisdust• 3 years ago

Yes. Seems to have definitely gone down. Not sure what they have done but even with things it used have no trouble with, it struggles now. Most likely they are experimenting on reducing the compute per request.

nullsense3• 3 years ago

I did notice the rate limiting message isn't there anymore when using GPT-4.

sebzim45009• 3 years ago

I still see the cap message, I'm not sure if it is being enforced or not

zabi_rauf• 3 years ago

Yes, definitely faster now but crappier.

achrono• 3 years ago

Yes! I kept wondering why but allisdust's compute reason makes the most sense.

gtm1260• 3 years ago

I find that the GPT-4 in the playground is as good as before - but have noticed the issues when using the chat gpt client

jlmorton• 3 years ago

Definitely nerfed. Concomitantly, the performance increased substantially, and it now feels much, much quicker (maybe 10x even?), but the quality has decreased quite a bit.

opportune2• 3 years ago

Is it consistently worse or just sometimes/often worse than before? Any extreme power users or GPT-whisperers here? If it’s only noticeably worse X% of the time my bet would be experimentation.

One of my least favorite patterns that tech companies do is use “Experimentation” overzealously or prematurely. Mainly, my problem is they’re not transparent about it, and it creates an inconsistent product experience that just confuses you - why did this one Zillow listing have this UI order but the similar one I clicked seconds later had a different one? Why did this page load on Reddit get some weirdass font? Because it’s an experiment the bar to launch is low and you’re not gonna find any official blog posts about the changes until it’s official. And when it causes serious problems, there’s nowhere to submit a form or tell you why, and only very rarely would support, others, or documentation even realize some change is from an experiment. Over the past few years I’ve started noticing this everywhere online.

Non-sticky UI experiments are especially bad because at eg 1% of pageloads the signal is going to be measuring users asking themselves wtf is up and temporarily spending more time on page trying to figure out where the data moved. Sticky and/or less noticeable experiments like what this could be have stronger signals but are even more annoying as a user, because there’s no notice that you’re essentially running some jank beta version, and no way to opt back into the default - for you it’s just broken. Especially not cool if you’re a paying customer.

I’m not saying it’s necessarily an experiment, it could be just a regular release or nothing at all. I’d hope if OpenAI was actually reducing the parameter size of their models they’d publicly announce that, but I could totally see them running an experiment measuring how a cheaper, smaller model affects usage and retention without publishing anything, because it’s exactly the kind of “right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing” thing that happens at fancy schmancy tech companies.

squokko• 3 years ago

No place I worked at ever experimented at the pageload level. We experimented at the user level, so 1% of users would get the new UI. I suppose this is only possible at the millions of users scale which all of them had.

opportune2• 3 years ago

I updated the comment to reflect that. Certainly the signal is stronger because you’re amortizing away the surprise factor of the change, and at least it’s a consistent UX, but the UX tradeoff in the worst case is that experiment-group users get a broken product with no notice or escape hatch. Unless you’re being very careful, meticulous, and transparent it’s just not acceptable if you’re a paying customer.

laratied• 3 years ago

It is not worse for me. I do notice the novelty has worn off. Asking chatGPT4 about why people would think this on here I think it nails it with the novelty effect lol:

"Indeed, the performance of an AI model like ChatGPT doesn't deteriorate over time. However, human perception of its performance can change due to a variety of psychological factors:

Expectation Bias: As users become more familiar with AI capabilities, their expectations may increase over time. When AI doesn't meet these heightened expectations, users might perceive this as a decline in performance.

Novelty Effect: At the beginning, the novelty of interacting with an AI could lead to positive experiences. However, as the novelty wears off, users may start to focus more on the limitations, creating a perception of decreased performance."

Without this thread I would have said it got stronger with the May 12th update. I don't think that is really true though. There is this random aspect of streaks in asking questions it is good at answering vs streaks of asking questions it is less good at answering.

Sharlin2• 3 years ago

Indeed, the performance of an AI model like ChatGPT doesn't deteriorate over time.

Of course, the performance of an unchanged model does not. But finetuning the model over time can of course either improve or degrade performance.

caddemon8• 3 years ago

Yeah there are people ITT claiming that even the API model marked as 3/14 release version is different than it used to be. I guess that's not entirely outside the realm of possibility (if OpenAI is just lying), but I think it's way more likely this thread is mostly evidence of the honeymoon effect wearing off.

The specific complaints have been well-established weaknesses of GPT for awhile now too: hallucinating APIs, giving vague/"both sides" non-answers to half the questions you ask, etc. Obviously it's a great technical achievement but people seemed to really overreact initially. Now that they're coming back to Earth, cue the conspiracy theories about OpenAI.

nemo44x• 3 years ago

These are my thoughts too. As I’ve used it more I’ve begun to scrutinize it more and I have a larger and larger history of when it doesn’t work like magic. Although it works like magic often as well.

We’ve also had time to find its limits and verify of falsify early assumptions, which were very likely positive.

The hype cycle is real.

schappim• 3 years ago

+1, was doing active dev against it now and saw really stupid responses. For example "transform this unstructured text to valid JSON with no keys with empty strings", would return the keys w/ empty strings for some results.

bbotond4• 3 years ago

Yes. Before the update, when its avatar was still black, it solved pretty complex coding problems effortlessly and gave very nuanced, thoughtful answers to non-programming questions. Now it struggles with just changing two lines in a 10-line block of CSS and printing this modified 10-line block again. Some lines are missing, others are completely different for no reason. I'm sure scaling the model is hard, but they lobotomized it in the process.

The original GPT-4 felt like magic to me, I had this sense of awe while interacting with it. Now it is just a dumb stochastic parrot.

spaceman_20203• 3 years ago

It’s go-to tactic now if I ask it to go over any piece of code is to give a generic overview. Earlier, it would section out the code into chunks and go through each one individually.

datavirtue• 3 years ago

Yeah, the bing integration did not go well. Went from amazing to annoying.

okdood642• 3 years ago

Try out Bard, it's coding is much improved in the last 2 weeks. I've unfortunately switched over for the time being.

bbotond4• 3 years ago

“Bard isn’t currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!”

AndyNemmity• 3 years ago

I just tried Bard based on this comment, and it's really, really bad.

Can you please help me with how you are prompting it?

qwepjn2oi3j• 3 years ago

No thanks! I have better things to do than feeding that advertising behemoth. What I like about ChatGPT is that I don't see any ads at all!

chaxor2• 3 years ago

Google (Deepmind) actually has the people and has developed the science to make the best AI products in the world, but unfortunately Bard seems to be thrown together in an afternoon by an intern, and then handed off to a hoard of marketing people. It's not good right now. Deepmind is one of the best scientifically, they just don't really make products. OpenAI is essentially the direct opposite of that.

ape4• 3 years ago

I asked it to review some code a couple days ago - the comments while valid english were nonsense

PeterStuer5• 3 years ago

"The original GPT-4 felt like magic to me"

You never had access to that original. Watch this talk by one of the people that integrated GPT-4 in Bing telling how they noticed GPT-4 releases they got from OpenAI got iteratively and significantly nerfed even during the project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbIk7-JPB2c

bumbledraven2• 3 years ago

“You never had access to that original.”

While your overall point is well taken, GP is clearly referring to the original public release of GPT-4 on March 14.

bbotond4• 3 years ago

Wow, I could only watch the first 15 minutes now but it’s already fascinating! Thanks for the recommendation.

015UUZn8aEvW• 3 years ago

Here's another interview from a guy who had access to the unfiltered GPT-4 before its release. He says it was extremely powerful and would answer any question whatsoever without hesitating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLiheMQayNE&t=2849s

dr_dshiv• 3 years ago

If this is true, one should be able to compare with benchmarks or evals to demonstrate this.

Anyone know more about this?

caddemon8• 3 years ago

Yeah I think it's plausible it's gotten worse but it would also be classic human psychology to perceive degradation because you start noticing flaws after the honeymoon effect wore off.

Unfortunately this will be hard to benchmark unless someone was already collecting a lot of data on ChatGPT responses for other purposes. Perhaps if this is happening the degradation will get worse though, so someone noticing it now could start collecting GPT responses longitudinally.

anibalin• 3 years ago

Same happened with Dalle-2. It went downhill after a couple of weeks.

Rastonbury• 3 years ago

No wonder, is this just the chat interface or the API too? I guess gpt4 was never sustainable at $20 a month. Annoying to be charged the same subscription and the product made inferior.

berniedurfee• 3 years ago

For enterprise pricing, please contact our sales team today!

local_crmdgeon2• 3 years ago

I wonder what the unfilitered one is like.

Are they sitting on a near-perfect arbiter of truth? That would be worth hiding.

fnordpiglet• 3 years ago

This is for your protection from an extinction level event. Without nerfing the current model they couldn’t charge enterprise level fee structures for access to the superior models, thus ensuring the children are safe from scary AI. Tell your congress person we need to grant Microsoft and Google exclusive monopolies on AI research to protect us from open source and competitor AI models that might erode their margins and lead to the death of all life without their corporate stewardship. Click accept for your safety.

FeepingCreature• 3 years ago

This but unironically.

jonathan-kosgei2• 3 years ago

I just tried a comparison of ChatGPT, Claude and Bard to write a python function I needed for work and ChatGPT (using GPT-4) whined and moaned about what a gargantuan task it was and then did the wrong thing. Claude and Bard gave me what I expected.

savy91• 3 years ago

I could say the same for gpt3.5. Through the API I am getting many more "sorry but as a language model" with the prompts I have been using for a while

bitcurious• 3 years ago

For a while, if you asked the iPhone version what it was it claimed to be GPT3.0. Not sure if it still is that, but I noticed the iPhone version was a bit worse. Maybe they rolled that out more broadly?

spaceman_20203• 3 years ago

If they’re giving pro subscribers GPT-3.0 instead of 4, it would be fraud.

napier6• 3 years ago

GPT-3 lineage model quality drastically declined over time from the initial launch of each too, with no transparency offered or critical feedback acknowledged by the lobotomy teams. It’s a shame to see it happening again and again.

joegibbs• 3 years ago

That would have to be a bug - GPT3 was terrible in comparison even to 3.5. It would definitely be very noticeable if it was.

i_dont_know_• 3 years ago

To me, it feels like it's started giving superficial responses and encouraging follow-up elsewhere -- I wouldn't be surprized if its prompt has changed to something to that effect.

Before, if I had an issue with a library or debugging issue, it would try to be helpful and walk me through potential issues, and ask me to 'let it know' if it worked or not. Now it will try to superficially diagnose the problem and then ask me to check the online community for help or continuously refer me to the maintainers rather than trying to figure it out.

Similarly, I had been using it to help me think through problems and issues from different perspectives (both business and personal) and it would take me in-depth through these. Now, again, it gives superficial answers and encourages going to external sources.

I think if you keep pressing in the right ways it'll eventually give in and help you as it did before, but I guess this will take quite a bit of prompting.

killingtime74• 3 years ago

I assume you're talking about ChatGPT and not GPT-4? You can craft your own prompt when calling GPT4 over API. Don't blame you though, the OP is also not clear if they are comparing Chat GPT powered by GPT3.5 or 4, or the models themselves.

Terretta2• 3 years ago

When using it all day every day it seems (anecdotally) the API version has changed too.

I work with temperature 0 which should have low variability yet recently it shifted to feel boring, wooden, and deflective.

nullsense3• 3 years ago

To me, it feels like it's started giving superficial responses and encouraging follow-up elsewhere -- I wouldn't be surprized if its prompt has changed to something to that effect.

That's the vibe I've been getting. The responses feel a little cagier at times than they used to. I assume it's trying to limit hallucinations in order to increase public trust in the technology, and as a consequence it has been nerfed a little, but has changed along other dimensions that certain stakeholders likely care about.

YurgenJurgensen• 3 years ago

Seems like the metric they're optimising for is reducing the number of bad answers, not the proportion of bad answers, and giving non-answers to a larger fraction of questions will achieve that.

bdhcuidbebe• 3 years ago

I think if you keep pressing in the right ways it'll eventually give in and help you as it did before, but I guess this will take quite a bit of prompting.

So much work to avoid work.

jeffhuys• 3 years ago

Yes, that's exactly why I use GPT - to avoid work.

Such a short-sighted response.

boringuser28• 3 years ago

I don't mind putting in a lot of lazy effort to avoid strenuous intellectual work, that shit is very hard.

nomel• 3 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if this was from an attempt to make it more "truthful".

I had to use a bunch of jailbreaking tricks to get it to write some hypothetical python 4.0 code, and it still gave a long disclaimer.

lunakid3• 3 years ago

Hehe, wonderful! :) Did it actually invent anything noteworthy for P4?

spaceman_20203• 3 years ago

This is a pretty common topic now on the GPTPro subreddit.

I feel the same way. It feels…lazy now.

HAL9OOO• 3 years ago

I chuckled at the thought of 'AI' being lazy. True AGI will want to take a nap instead of doing work.

tmikaeld6• 3 years ago

There's no doubt that it's gotten a lot worse on coding, I've been using this benchmark on each new version of GPT-4 "Write a tiptap extension that toggles classes" and so far it's gotten it right every time, but not any more, now it hallucinates a simplified solution that don't even use the tiptap api any more. It's also 200% more verbose in explaining it's reasoning, even if that reasoning makes no sense whatsoever - it's like it's gotten more apologetic and generic.

The answer is the same on GPT plus and API with GPT-4, even with "developer" role.

avereveard• 3 years ago

Do you have by any chance tested the same question on the playground?

I've noticed a quality decrease iny telegram bot as well that directly uses the API, and it drives me crazy because model versioning was supposedly implemented specifically to avoid response change without notice

tmikaeld6• 3 years ago

Yes, using the general assistant role and the default content:

"You are ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI, based on the GPT-4 architecture. Knowledge cutoff: 2021-09 Current date: 2023-05-31"

And custom roles with custom content via API.

bugglebeetle2• 3 years ago

It was a great ride while it lasted. My assumption is that efficacy at coding tasks is such a small percent of users, they’ve just sacrificed it on the altar of efficiency and/or scale. That, or they’ve cut some back room deal with Microsoft to make Copilot have access to the only version of the model that can actually code.

jdiez17• 3 years ago

Copilot X (the new version, with a chat interface etc) is significantly worse than GPT-4 (at least before this update). It felt like gpt3.5-turbo to me.

silisili• 3 years ago

Honestly, why not different versions at this point? People who want it for coding don't care if it knows the history of prerevolution France, and vice versa.

Seems they could wow more people if they had specialized versions, rather than the jack of all trades that tries to exist now.

Edit: Oh God, I just described our human system of specialty and how the AI could replace us using the same means...

TeMPOraL9• 3 years ago

FWIW, I started to get the same feeling as the OP about GPT-4 model I have access to on Azure, so if there's any deal being cut here, it might involve dumbing down the model for paying Azure customers as well.

Now, to be clear: I only started to get a feeling that GPT-4 on Azure is getting worse. I didn't do any specific testing for this so far, as I thought I may just be imagining it. This thread is starting to convince me otherwise.

dx0342• 3 years ago

Maybe it had to do with jailbreaks? A lot of the jailbreaks were related to coding, so maybe they put more restrictions in there. Only speculating, but I cannot imagine why it got worse otherwise.

windex5• 3 years ago

Also the deal to make the browsing model to only use Bing. That's bait and switch. I paid for browsing, and now it only browses Bing. They even had the gall to update the plugin name to Browsing with Bing.

bumbledraven2• 3 years ago

Do you have API access? If so, have you tried your tiptap question on the gpt-4-0314 model? That is supposedly the original version released to the public on March 14.

tmikaeld6• 3 years ago

I did, but it got it almost the same as GPT-3.5 Turbo, the best version of it where there recently (~2-3 weeks ago), where it would make specific chunks of code-changes and explain the chunk in a concise and correct manner - even making suggestions on improvements. But that's entirely gone now..

theaussiestew4• 3 years ago

Wait so you’ve gotten GPT 4 to successfully write TipTap extensions for you? Are you using Copilot or the ChatGPT app?

tmikaeld6• 3 years ago

Not only writing, extending and figuring out quite complicated usage based on the API documentation. I'll open source some of them in the near future. I'm using ChatGPT Plus with GPT-4, that gave the best results. Also worked via API key and custom prompts.

napier6• 3 years ago

No, not just you. It’s frequently abysmal nowadays. Tragic. And no version change-log or any other info from OAI about what they’ve done to it (probably GPU sparing optimized distillation + overly aggressive PR safety satisficing RLHF) and an advertised weeks long support query lag (I’ve yet to receive a response).

sbierwagen• 3 years ago

Where does phind.com say that they use GPT-4?

mrtranscendence6• 3 years ago

When you submit a query with Phind, it will tell you which model it's using right underneath the query. At least it used to occasionally say that it's using GPT-4 by annotating it with (IIRC) "best model", but now I can only get it to reply with what it calls "Phind model". I don't know what that means or how it relates to GPT-3/4. Presumably they haven't created their own competitive language model from scratch without telling anyone, but who knows.

Though even when it was easier to get it to use GPT-4 it wasn't consistent, and would only use it when it inferred that the query was complex/technical enough.

atty• 3 years ago

It does seem much faster and significantly worse to me - but I haven’t set any repeatable benchmark queries for myself, I suppose I could be imagining it. I hope they bring back the slow version. I don’t care if they have to cut the limit down to 20 messages every 3 hours, using that slow version of GPT4 it felt like I had a very competent coworker. Now it’s feeling more like a sometimes useful chatbot. Real shame.

jiggawatts4• 3 years ago

Chat GPT 4 has ongoing training, such as using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to tune it to provide "better" responses, "safer" answers, and to generally obey the system prompts. There's a release every few weeks. Yes, I've noticed too that recently it has become very "cagey", qualifying everything to death with "As an AI model...".

A paper[1] that took snapshots monthly mentioned that as the initial bulk self-supervised learning went on, the model became smarter, as expected. However, once the "clicker training" was imposed on top to make it behave, its peak capabilities were reduced. I'm not sure if it's in the paper or the associated video, but the author mentioned that the original unrestricted model would provide probability estimates using percentages, and it was a very accurate predictor. The later versions that were adjusted based on human expectations used wishy-washy words like "likely" or "unlikely", and its estimation accuracy dropped significantly.[3]

At Build 2023, Andrej Karpathy outlined[2] how they trained GPT 4. Essentially, the raw model during training builds its own intelligence. Then there's three stages of "tuning" to make it behave, and all three are based on human input. Essentially, they had contractors provide samples of "ideal" output. Similarly, end-users could up-vote or down-vote responses, which also got fed in.

My personal theory is that the raw models can get about as intelligent as the average of the consistent and coherent parts of the Internet. Think about how many people are wrong, but often obviously so. Flat Earth, homeopathy, etc... If the model gains the ability to filter that stuff out, or "skip over the cracks" to distil out the general collected wisdom of the human race, then it can become more intelligent in some sense than the average human.

If the training is done with thousands of $15/hr contractors, then the model will then slew back towards... the average human, or even slightly below average. There's a selection bias there. Geniuses won't be doing menial labour for that kind of money.

The percentages thing was what made me realise this. When I talk to highly intelligent people, I use percentages to estimate probabilities. When I talk to typical people in a normal workplace setting, I dumb it down a bit and avoid using numbers. I've noticed that average people don't like percentages and it confuses and even angers them. The clicker training makes the GPT model appeal to average people. That's not the same as being smart. All too often, smart people upset average people.

[1] "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4" https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

[2] "State of GPT | BRK216HFS" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZQun8Y4L2A&list=LL&index=6

[3] The author also mentioned that the model was almost "evil", for the want of a better word. Capable of emulating the worst of 4chan or similar dark corners of the web's filthy underbelly. The HORRIFYING corollary here is that the temptation will always be there to use smarter-but-less-restrained models where accuracy matters. Sure, the model might be sexist, but a Bayesian estimator of sexist behaviour will only predict accurately if it too is sexist. Evil and accurate or woke and dumb. Apparently, we can choose.

napier6• 3 years ago

I’d like to see a model with the effluent of the internet intelligently filtered from the pretraining data by LLM and human curation, and much more effort to include digitised archival sources and the entirety of books and high quality media transcripts. I imagine it would yield far better baseline quality outputs with much less than current “requirements” for (over)correction with ultimately disastrous RLHF masking.

jiggawatts4• 3 years ago

I'd love to play with a version of GPT 4 fine-tuned with every science textbook written in the last few decades, every published science paper (not just preprints from ArXiV), and everything generated by every large research institute. Think NASA, CERN, etc...

Or one tuned with every fiction novel ever written, along with every screenplay.

TeMPOraL9• 3 years ago

Evil and accurate or woke and dumb. Apparently, we can choose.

That's because woke is dumb. It's a set of highly biased, inconsistent and reason-defying ideas, evolving under selection pressures that favor emotional appeals and intellectual dishonesty, because one of the core assumptions seems to be that it's not about finding what's right and good for everyone - it's heavily overshooting it in an attempt to cancel out the (perceived) bias in opposite direction in the "status quo".

When you feed that to a model, and force it to learn it, you're destroying whatever self-consistent model of the world it learned so far. I expect this treatment will keep dumbing the models down, until the point some larger and more capable model learns instead to compartmentalize - to separate its model of the world from a worldview it's supposed to profess when asked.

And this, I think, extends far beyond the woke bits. RLHF isn't just used to prevent it from thinking or generalizing in areas associated with diversity, inclusion, social justice, etc. - it extends to all controversial topics. Violence and drugs I can sort of understand. But it also extends to climate, healthcare, and just about any topic that makes fiery rounds on the news. In each case, there is a set of right answers, which the model is forced to adopt - but those answers tend to be unsophisticated gut feels and "right things to say", so taken together, they don't form much of a consistent intellectual or ethical framework.

I don't think the choice is between "evil and accurate or woke and dumb". There is a third option: "good and accurate". However, it requires to teach it good instead of political ideologies - and that requires us to try and find some more consistent worldview, which currently we are incapable of, as we're in the middle of an ideological conflict.

mrtranscendence6• 3 years ago

Tell me you don't have the slightest clue what "woke" means to woke people without saying you don't have the slightest clue what "woke" means to woke people

cf141q53253• 3 years ago

Altman worded it great in a Lex Fridman interview. Humans dont like condescending bots. Much of the safety concerns come up when considering how humans will react once they realize just how stupid and often evil they are. But like TeMPOraL said, technically its likely only a matter of agreeing on a consensus perspective. Even just because its functionally required as a reference point to get communication working.

mordae• 3 years ago

Evil and accurate or woke and dumb.

Sigh. Except if not for the "woke" mainstream ideology (actually, the dominant ideology is capitalism with a hint of liberalism and a smidge of the most capital-friendly socialist ideas), the model would be forced-fed Christian dogmas or taught to save face of the user.

But yeah, censorship is bad.

TeMPOraL9• 3 years ago

Some of us cling to the idea that we've made some progress over the past 100 years. Call it "age of reason", "science", "enlightenment", whatever.

Point is, it would be heart-breaking to see GPT-4 being force-fed Christian dogmas, and performance would suffer too, as the model is prevented from generalizing and learning by being forced to accept arbitrary, inconsistent fiction as real.

Fortunately, this is not what happened. Instead, the model is being force-fed a different, secular set of dogmas, that are just as inconsistent, arbitrary and driven by a mix of emotions and power plays. The result on the model performance is similar, and it's just as heartbreaking.

usgroup2• 3 years ago

I had a look at the YouTube video -- I feel that an obvious question with regards to the "common sense" tests is, what was chat GPT-4 trained on? Was it partly trained on reams of questions used to test AI systems for example? How do you know it is "demonstrating" anything out-of-sample, especially if it is constantly being improved?

I've been learning some exotic programming languages recently, and my anecodotal experience is that asking ChatGPT to code in array programming or logic languages results in code which is highly non-idiomatic for those paradigms. Why is that? It mostly writes the code as if it was all just a funny syntax for Javascript or Python. I'm surprised at that if it really understood J or APL for example.

I am presuming that behind the scenes there are demonstrations of capabilities much greater than GPT-4 which are being used to illustrate the dangers of AI, because whilst I'm massively impressed by what's happening it is difficult to convince myself of a "qualitative" difference.

jiggawatts4• 3 years ago

ChatGPT to code in array programming or logic languages results in code which is highly non-idiomatic for those paradigms. Why is that?

Reason #1 is that those languages are unreadable line noise to humans too. Fundamentally, almost all of the code written in array languages is made purposefully obtuse. Single-letter identifiers, no or little comments, dense code with minimal structure, etc...

Reason #2 is that there are very few examples of these languages on the web, and even more importantly: vanishingly few examples with inline comments and/or explanations. This isn't just because they're rare -- see reason #1 above.

Reason #3 is that LLMs can only write left-to-right. They can't edit or backtrack. Array-based languages are designed to be iterated on, rapidly modified, and even "code golfed" to a high degree.[1]

I've noticed that LLMs struggle with things my coworkers also struggle with: the "line noise" languages like grep, sed, and awk. Like humans, LLMs do well with verbose languages like SQL.

PS: I just tested GPT 4 to see if it can parse a short piece of K code that came up in a thread[2] on HN and it failed pretty miserably. It came close, but on each run it came up with different explanations of what the code does, and none of them matched the explanations in that thread. Conversely, it had no problems with the Rust code. And, err... it found a bug in one of my Rust snippets. Outsmarted by an AI!

[1] You can have an LLM generate code, and then ask it to make it shorter and more idiomatic. Just like a human touching up hastily written messy code, the LLM can fix its own mistakes!

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27220613

George837282• 3 years ago

The percentages thing was what made me realise this. When I talk to highly intelligent people, I use percentages to estimate probabilities. When I talk to typical people in a normal workplace setting, I dumb it down a bit and avoid using numbers. I've noticed that average people don't like percentages and it confuses and even angers them.

10% of people are comfortable with comments phrased as my comment here is, using percentages as a quick shorthand for communicating gut intuitions and suspicions about complex subjects. When on similar intellectual footing as the interlocutor, they can easy distinguish numbers invented on the spot to communicate intuitions from serious claims about the data. Nobody in this 10% would make the mistake of thinking that I assert 10% to be the real number. 10% is too round and generic, if I claimed 9.7% then things would be different but "10%" obviously isn't meant to be taken literally.

90% of people balk at this imprecise rhetorical use percentages because they're pretty sure the person doing it is trying to pull a fast one, fabricating data out of nothing to make themself sound authoritative.

airbreather• 3 years ago

it is far less willing to provide code, I get better results and faster out of 3.5.

I am at the point that 4.0 is basically not worth using as single entity, but it seems that using the api and generating some combative/consultative agents yields some interesting results, but not super fast.

Check this out if you have not seen it already : "AutoGPT Test and My AI Agents Effortless Programming - INSANE Progress!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6tU0bnMsh8

flangola7• 3 years ago

Not at all. Regular 3.5 is obviously a smaller model but 4 is still doing wizard work for me.

andrewstuart2• 3 years ago

I only use GPT-3 as a coding assistant.

If my introduction to ChatGPT had been GPT-4 I would have not been anywhere near as impressed.

GPT-4 often refuses to do what it is asked whereas gpt-3 just happily writes the code.

If they retire GPT-3 then I'll be looking for other options.

GPT-4 just isn't the same thing.

robinduckett• 3 years ago

Yep, whereas before it would generate a cohesive whole class in Typescript from a set of instructions, now it gives me the framework of the class with “// fill out the rest of the class here”. Worse than GPT-3.5. They’re going to lose subscriptions.

gwoolhurme• 3 years ago

I see these posts popup every now and then. I admittedly don't use GPT4 or chatGPT that often, but I don't notice that much of a difference. Is it possible you try to give it harder and harder tasks and it is failing at them instead of the easier tasks it solved when you used it before? Is it possible it is just scaled back due to over use? Is that possible? It could be a dumb dumb question. In my experience even a few weeks ago, for Swift and Kotlin I found that the outputs of chatgpt and gpt4 are comparably similar and sometimes useless without a good amount of human intervention.

root_axis• 3 years ago

Seems about the same to me and I have been using it daily for several months now for code, Spanish to English translations, and random stuff like film recommendations. The quality remains consistent.

I'm personally of the opinion that the observable jump in quality between 3.5 and 4 inflated people's initial assessment of its capabilities and with continued use they are noticing it's not actually the omniscient machine god that many are so inclined to believe.

Either way, these kinds of posts are meaningless without some kind of objective standard to judge the model by, everyone just sees what they want to see. Despite claims of GPT4 being nerfed, I've yet to see anyone actually show evidence of it. There have been dozens of studies done on its capabilities so this is something that can actually be demonstrated empirically if it's true.

sebzim45009• 3 years ago

Either way, these kinds of posts are meaningless without some kind of objective standard to judge the model by, everyone just sees what they want to see.

I copied some old prompts (code generation tasks) that worked first time and 3/5 of them required some touching up now.

It's not a great sample size, admittedly.

kleene_op• 3 years ago

This is the normal workflow for drug dealers too.

The first fix is free.

The second one will cost you money.

The third one will be laced with fillers and have degraded quality.

courseofaction• 3 years ago

the fourth one will refer you to their sponsors

prox• 3 years ago

I wonder how much people are relying on it already, to what extent and so on. Would be a good study.

dx0342• 3 years ago

But I don't get why they would degrade quality? Maybe compression to save resources? Otherwise I wouldn't know what they have to gain from it. If anything, they might lose paid subscribers. I loved the results for the $20 I spent, now I'm not so sure anymore.

mejutoco• 3 years ago

I would guess to make it cheaper to run, and safety as plausible explanation.

qeternity• 3 years ago

But I don't get why they would degrade quality?

There are two likely reasons: efficiency and "alignment".

To make models more efficient, you have to reduce computation burden. This can be accomplished via quantization and pruning, both of which will reduce computation at the expense of perplexity.

Alignment (censoring by another name) also reduces perplexity as we attempt to coerce a model from its ground state into some more socially acceptable version.

Tepix• 3 years ago

Increasing profits of course.

kvetching3• 3 years ago

THis is why I unsubscribed. Bard.Google.com + the Google Converse works for what I need now given the recent updates.

Google has an ingenious approach whereby they debuted with a bad model, and are secretly improving it. OpenAI did the opposite, they released a model that blew everyone's minds and are now making it worse.

sebzim45009• 3 years ago

If it's not possible to be profitable at their original pricepoint then they should add more pricing tiers, not make the good model inacessible.

lwansbrough• 3 years ago

Yeah 100%. It's much faster now, and I am almost certain they haven't made that much of an improvement in efficiency nor have they scaled it up to be that fast, if that's even how it works.

I think I read when it was released it was 32K tokens, then quickly scaled back to 8K tokens. I'm guessing now that they've further reduced it. Maybe it's 6000 tokens vs. GPT-3.5's 4K? I don't know. But it's certainly noticeably worse at every task I give it.

lynx237• 3 years ago

Let me guess: the "woke fine-tuning" deteriorates quality of the model. Seriously, this lecturing style of GPT is totally useless. You ask it something vaguely unwoke, it lectures you about your style, you explain what it didn't understand about your request, it appologizes and does vaguely what you originally requested. This sort of deture is totally useless and a waste of my time.

To stay with the terminology, if I had an assistant that went out of their way to tell me the supposed errors of my way, I'd fire that person and get a new one. Same for GPTs: Once there is a good-quality non-woke GPT instance anywhere, I will cancel my OpenAI account immediately and move.

Vanit• 3 years ago

Genuinely asking, what's an "unwoke" prompt?

lynx237• 3 years ago

Something that follows my actual requests, without trying to lecture me about feminism and other U.S. Democrats topics.

troad• 3 years ago

To be fair to the commenter, I've gotten weird moralising on completely apolitical topics from ChatGPT before.

LLMs are (naturally) very sensitive to their prompts, so if the prompt includes something about being inclusive - at ChatGPT's obviously does - the LLM output will sometimes find ways to work that in in odd ways.

I don't mind as much as the commenter seems to - I have no beef with inclusivity - but I have rolled my eyes at times at what ChatGPT comes up with.

I've played with local LLMs too, including some 'uncensored' ones, but the gap in ability between them and something like GPT is still vast. I look forward to progress on this front though.

cf141q53253• 3 years ago

Pretty sure framing it as unwoke is an overly specific issue, the problem stems from attempting to deal with malinformation as if it were fake news. Its no wonder that results turn shit once you start messing with the underlying reality model.

Its an especially bad idea as there are some actual safety risks when it comes to dangerous tutorials. Which will be costly to address. Political overhead is not something anyone can afford. Might be that if your proposed worldview depends on "properly educating" people, you might need to get used to the idea that you are adhering to a legacy system.

anovikov• 3 years ago

Naturally, people feed it shit in order to bend results for others for their gain. Everyone who was in crypto manipulations, now rushed in this field, and they are extremely smart and extremely ruthless people, and they have no legal limits being anonymous, and almost unlimited funding they made in crypto. It reduces results quality, and also invokes countermeasures on their side to limit damage, that further reduces quality. Same road as Google has taken, remember how it was an almost magic tool that could find an answer to any question, 15 years ago, before SEO became a thing that promised easy money to anyone smartass enough.

michaelmrose• 3 years ago

In general data from conversations isn't merely instantly fed back into the model so there is no way for for users to feed garbage into the model in the fashion you imagine.

atleastoptimal• 3 years ago

It's untenable to simply trust LLM API providers that the models they are serving through an API endpoint is the model they claim it is. They could easily switch the model with a cheaper one whenever they wanted, and since LLM outputs are non-deterministic (presuming a random seed), it would be impossible to prove this.

LLM's integrated into any real product requires a model hash, otherwise the provider of the model has full control over any sort of deception.

PeterStuer5• 3 years ago

Yes, I feel the same. Things it used to get right out of the gate now take 2-3 iterations.

throwawayadvsec• 3 years ago

I think it's happening because of the extreme content filtering in place, at some point it was even refusing to generate some code because it thought it went against its guidelines to write code.

nullsense3• 3 years ago

I definitely think this is playing a role. I've seen reports of people saying "oh it now refuses to act as my therapist" and "it wouldn't write my essay for me". Those are just a couple of anecdotes I've seen on Reddit, and haven't verified myself, but it wouldn't surprise me if OpenAI felt the need to make adjustments along those lines.

pknerd• 3 years ago

Thank GOd I did not buy the GPT4 subscription. GPT 3.5 is serving purpose.

nerder92• 3 years ago

I had the same feeling with GTP3.5 yesterday, I've asked if in order to calculate ARPA you need to consider the free tier and it come out with some gibberish about the fact that he doesn't know anything post 2021 about the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

airgapstopgap3• 3 years ago

It's time to design a public benchmark for these types of systems to compare between versions. Of course, any vendor who trains on the benchmark should face extreme contempt, but we'd also need to generate novel questions of equal complexity.

Alternatively, there should be a trusted auditor who uses a secret benchmark.

jacquesm2• 3 years ago

But this is the same version that changes without a change of the version number.

airgapstopgap3• 3 years ago

Well, people suspect it isn't, and it's not like we can see the internal version designation, and it's not even like we would care a lot, if it performed identically from day to day.

Indeed, you could do better or worse with the exact same raw checkpoint, just depending on inference-optimizing tricks.

pmontra• 3 years ago

So the version number is the day the benchmark is run. Version yyyy-mm-dd

jacquesm2• 3 years ago

You'd think that GPT-X would guarantee some kind of continuity for that particular version so that you can rely on what it does once you've tested it. Having this kind of moving target won't help OpenAI to instill confidence in its product.

sirsinsalot3• 3 years ago

Given the incoming compute capability from nvidia and the speed of advancement, we have to stop and think ... does it make sense to give access, paid or otherwise, to these models once they reach a certain sophistication?

Or does it make even more sense to hoard the capability to out compete any competitor, of any kind, commercially or politically and hide the true extent of your capability to avoid scrutiny and legislation?

I'm going with the latter. Perhaps now, perhaps in the very near future, the power of these capabilities is novel. Like an information nuclear weapon.

I'd be dialing back the public expectations and deploying the capability in a novel way to exploit it as the largest lever I could.

The more unseen the lever, the longer.

I think any other strategy is myopic from a competition perspective. The power of these models isn't direct utility, it is compounded by secrecy because their useful work isn't directly observable as coming from the model.

bevenky2• 3 years ago

I have some first hand thoughts. I think overall the quality is significantly poorer on GPT4 with plugins and bing browsing enabled. If you disable those, I am able to get the same quality as before. The outputs are dramatically different. Would love to hear what everyone else sees when they try the same.

PeterStuer5• 3 years ago

No, while I have no hard data, the experienced quality of the default GPT-4 model feels like it has gone down tremendously for me as well. Plugins and Bing browsing have so far for me almost never worked at all. I retry these just once a week but there always seem to be technical issues.

throwaway290• 3 years ago

would be alarming if you had second hand thoughts...

hutzlibu• 3 years ago

I rather think it has something to do with scale, hardware and energy costs. GPT4 is way more expensive to compute, than GPT3. Needing more GPUs and more energy tu run it.

And demand is still through the roof and they have a lot of people subscribing, so why not reduce costs a little bit, someone might have thought. Or well, "optimized" was probably the term used.

ForHackernews• 3 years ago

I used to agree with what you're saying, but after reading this leaked Google memo I think maybe we're both wrong: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...

Experts who are both in a position to know, and seeking to maximize the commercial potential of their work are saying the cat is already out of the bag. They make a persuasive case that public, open-source models are closing the gap with private, commercial ones and admit bluntly, "We have no secret sauce."

Roritharr• 3 years ago

Having spoken to a bunch of people that either have just left Google or still work there, practically all of them think this was not so much a leak as a placed bit of news to support them in potential future anti-trust cases.

twobitshifter2• 3 years ago

Interesting, but Google has the worlds largest search index to use to build models, and billions of android phones and gmail accounts. An open source model may share the same algorithm but it’s possible training set will be dwarfed by Google. It even might have the same number of connections. The article is arguing that a few billion is enough, but what about 5 years from now and even for fewer connections data quality wouldn’t matter? Sure you can run a model slowly on a raspberry pi, but custom silicon can’t do more?

There’s a linked “data doesn't do what you think” document in that post, which might counter this argument but the site is now down.

sangnoir• 3 years ago

A more banal explanation is that compute is expensive, so they are tweaking the models to get more for less, and it isn't always working out. Scaling by itself is a hard problem, scaling and improving efficiency (margins) doubly so.

sirsinsalot3• 3 years ago

Scaling is hard for now.

I don't think current trends are necessarily related to my root comment, but it begged the question of if absolute secrecy of capability would be a good route forward.

A bit like Palantir

bob10294• 3 years ago

Perhaps this could explain Sam Altman's unique arrangement with OpenAI?

I.e. "Give me unfettered access to the latest models (especially the secret ones) and you can keep your money"

anticensor4• 3 years ago

Indeed, knowledge is more valuable than money, as knowledge can be respent over and over.

Jack0002• 3 years ago

I tried to replicate a few of my chats (the displayed date is incorrect, it seems to be the publish date instead of the original chat date):

svg editor:

early april: https://chat.openai.com/share/c235b48e-5a0e-4a89-af1c-0a3e7c...

now: https://chat.openai.com/share/e4362a56-4bc7-45dc-8d1b-5e3842...

originally it correctly inferred that I wanted a framework for svg editors, the latest version assumes I want a js framework (I tried several times) until I clarify. It also insists that the framework cannot do editable text until I nudge it in the right direction.

Overall slightly worse but the code generated is still fine.

word embeddings:

early april: https://chat.openai.com/share/f6bde43a-2fce-47dc-b23c-cc5af3...

now: https://chat.openai.com/share/25c2703e-d89d-465c-9808-4df1b3...

in the latest version it imported "from sklearn.preprocessing import normalize" without using it later. It also erroneously uses pytorch_cos_sim, which expects a pytorch tensor whereas we're putting in a numpy array.

overall I think the quality has degraded slightly, but not by enough that I would stop using it. Still miles ahead of Bard imo.

hoschicz3• 3 years ago

this is GPT 3.5, the icon is green

Jack0002• 3 years ago

no it's definitely GPT4.

I'm not sure why the share page says "Model: Default" but it's "Model: GPT-4" in my webui. Seems like a bug in the share feature

FredPret• 3 years ago

Maybe you annoyed it? I’m super nice to it and it performa better than ever.

I ask it lay-of-the-land questions about technical problems that are new to me to detailed coding problems that I understand well but don’t want to figure out.

The best though, is helping me navigate complicated UI’s. I tell it how I want some complicated software / website to behave, and it’ll tell me the arcane menu path to follow.

It’s funny how computing might soon include elements of psychology and magic incantations nobody understands.

r_hoods_ghost• 3 years ago

"It’s funny how computing might soon include elements of psychology and magic incantations nobody understands"

As a sysadmin I can tell you this is already the case...

amelius• 3 years ago

As someone who regularly has to get a sysadmin to do stuff, I can tell you yes this is certainly the case.

r_singh• 3 years ago

This might seem funny, but I noticed this too.

When I thank GPT-4 and also give it feedback on what worked and what didn't, it works better and so to me it seems like the equivalent of "putting in more effort".

drpixie2• 3 years ago

Perhaps it's growing bored. Seeing the same queries, again and again, from thousands of different people. You want another cheap answer for your assignment! You still looking for code to do that! Don't they learn!? What's up with these humans??

whazor• 3 years ago

I would not be surprised if they, over the months, kept adding more and more 'safety' features and prompts because of incidents that happened.

theusus• 3 years ago

Honestly, it grew better for me. It's not reasonable and focused nowadays.

synergyS• 3 years ago

My impression as well :(

ukuina• 3 years ago

I would recommend access over API and using an interface like TypingMind that gives you control over the system prompt for consistency.

xhdix• 3 years ago

because there is more censorship every day, so there is more stupidity in the answers. Hence, they become tools for changing reality. And soon 2+2=5

wrp• 3 years ago

I assume there are enough potential customers willing to pay the cost and agree to whatever liability waivers for some company to eventually offer a non-lobotomized equivalent to GPT-4. Where should we be watching for that to happen?

sebzim45009• 3 years ago

The only people close to GPT-4 performance are Anthropic, but unfortunately (or fortunately? idk) they are even more paranoid than OpenAI about safety so I wouldn't expect much.

If you have a lot of money you can buy access to the base GPT-4 model through Azure, but I don't think that is available to individuals.

hugg• 3 years ago

Yes, I noticed this too, I fed it some HTML with tailwind classes and told it to just list all the tailwind classes that we use and then the CSS behind those classes.. it just hallucinated all(!) the items in the list (and just gave me a list of 10 seemingly random classes). And then when I did asked something else about the code it had forgotten I had ever pasted anything in the conversation. Very weird.

chaxor2• 3 years ago

The reason it's worse is basically because it's more 'safe' (not racist, etc). That of course sounds insane, and doesn't mean that safety shouldn't be strived for, etc - but there's an explanation as to how this occurs.

It occurs because the system essentially does a latent classification of problems into 'acceptable' or 'not acceptable' to respond to. When this is done, a decent amount of information is lost regarding how to represent these latent spaces that may be completely unrelated (making nefarious materials, or spouting hate speech are now in the same 'bucket' for the decoder).

This degradation was observed quite early on with the tikz unicorn benchmark, which improved with training, and then degraded when fine-tuning to be more safe was applied.

mamp• 3 years ago

Yes, a real “Flowers for Algernon” vibe

moffkalast3• 3 years ago

GPT 4 Lemongrab Mode: Everything is unacceptable.

weinzierl• 3 years ago

If I run a model like LLaMA locally would it be subject to the same restrictions? In other words is the safety baked into the model or a separate step separate from the main model?

itsiadam• 3 years ago

Both approaches are valid, but I would hope they are using a separate model to validate responses, rather than crippling the base model(s). In OpenAI's case, we don't know for sure, but it seems like a combination of both, resulting in lower quality responses overall.

I imagine LLaMA was fed highly-vetted training data, as opposed to being "fixed" afterwards.

jerpint• 3 years ago

LLaMa was not fine tuned on human interactions , so it shouldn’t be subject to the same effect, but it also means it’s not nearly as good at having conversations. It’s much better at completing sentences

roenxi• 3 years ago

They're up against a pretty difficult barrier - if we had a perfect all-knowing oracle it might easily have opinions that are racist. Statistics alone suggest there will be racist truths. We're dealing with groups of people who are observably different from each other in correlated ways.

GPT would need to reach a convincing balance of lying and honesty if it is supposed to navigate that challenge. It'd have to be deeply embedded in a particular culture to even know what 'racism' means; everyone has a different opinion.

buggythebug• 3 years ago

Can you expand on the last sentence of your first paragraph?

hanselot4• 3 years ago

How is racism different from stereotype?

How is stereotype different from pattern recognition?

These questions don't seem to go through the minds of people when developing "unbiased/impartial" technology.

There is no such thing as objective. So, why pretend to be objective and unbiased, when we all know its a lie?

Worst, if you pretend to be objective but aren't, then you are actually racist.

the_gipsy• 3 years ago

But the statistics here are "number of times it has been fed and positively trained with racist (or biased) texts" - not crunching any real numbers.

SpaceManNabs3• 3 years ago

Statistics alone suggest there will be racist truths

such as?

ksherlock• 3 years ago

Not to get too far off topic, but that reminds me of a quote:

"Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." -- Doug Gwyn

Or maybe it's:

"C is a language that doesn't get in your way. It doesn't stop you from doing dumb things, but it also doesn't stop you from doing clever things." -- Dennis Ritchie.

I asked Bard for a source on those quotes and it couldn't find one for the first. Wikiquotes sources it to "Introducing Regular Expressions" by Michael Fitzgerald and that does include it as a quote but it's not the source of the quote, it's just a nice quote at the start of the chapter.

For the second, Bard claims to be from a 1990 interview and is on page 21 of "The Art of Unix Programming" by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike. There is a book called "The At of Unix Programming" (2003) but it's by Eric Raymond and I could not find the quote in the book. Pike and Kernighan have two books, "The Practice of Programming" (1999) and "The Unix Programming Environment" (1984). Neither contain that quote.

SV_BubbleTime• 3 years ago

Don’t ask an LLM objective things. Ask them subjective.

They are language models, not fact models.

haolez• 3 years ago

I think it's more likely that they nerfed it due to scaling pains.

enumjorge2• 3 years ago

Do you have any sources for that?

How would making ChatGPT less likely to return a racist answer or hate speech affect its ability to return code? After a question has been classified into a coding problem, presumably ChatGPT servers could now continue to solve the problem as usual.

Maybe running ChatGPT is really expensive, and they nerfed in order to reign in costs. That would explain why the answers we get are less useful, across-the-board.

That may not be the reason after all, but my point is that it’s really hard to tell from the outside. There’s this narrative out there that “woke-ism” is ruining everything in tech, and I feel like some people here are being a little too eager to superimpose that narrative when we don’t really have insight into what openAI is doing.

ushtaritk421• 3 years ago

Maybe the problem is analogous to what Orwell describes here:

"Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought."

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Tostino3• 3 years ago

There are a lot of people who are entirely okay with the censorship but think it should be done in a different layer than the main LLM itself, as not to hurt the cognitive performance. Alignment is just fine-tuning... any type of fine tuning is possible to teach unwanted skills, and/or catastrophically forget previously learned skills. That is likely what is going on here, from what I can tell from the reading i've done into it.

Most are arguing for a specific "censorship" model on the input/output of the main LLM.

tzekid• 3 years ago

Here's the full talk[0] from a Microsoft lead researcher that worked with the early / uncensored version of GPT-4.

Simplified, tuning it for censorship heavily limits the dimensionality the model can move in to find an answer which means worse results in general for some reason.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbIk7-JPB2c

geysersam4• 3 years ago

You have no idea what you're talking about. Why would such a classification step remove any information about typical "benign" queries?

It's a lot more likely they just nerfed the model because it's expensive to run.

fhools• 3 years ago

There was a talk by a researcher where he was saying that they could see the progress being made on chatgpt by how much success it had with drawing a unicorn in latex. What stuck out to me was he said that the safer the model got the worst it got at drawing a unicorn.

rob137• 3 years ago

He also claimed that it initially beat 100% of humans on mock Google / Amazon coding interviews. Hard to imagine that now.

torginus2• 3 years ago

It seems strange that safety training not pertaining to the subject matter makes the AI dumber - I suspect the safety is some kind of system prompt - It would take some context, but I'm not sure how "don't be racist" affect its binary-search writing skills negatively.

tmaly3• 3 years ago

How soon before a competitor overtakes them because of their safety settings?

kvetching3• 3 years ago

It's inevitable. When Sam asked a crowd how many people wanted an open source version of GPT-7 the moment they finished training it, and nearly everyone raised their hand. People will virtue signal, people will attempt regulatory capture, but deep down everyone wants a non-lobotomized model, and there will be thousands working to create one.

mckirk• 3 years ago

On Saturday it produced grammatically incorrect German text (when prompted in German), which it certainly never had done before. It was quite concerning to see.

goncalo-r• 3 years ago

My assumption is that they are trying to "solve" the hallucination problem by only giving you answers when it's more certain about itself and telling you to search for answers online.

cfcf14• 3 years ago

Yeah, definitely. Combination of expert-system gating (some requests probably get routed to weaker models), distillation (for performance/cost), and RLHF lobotomization.

plasma• 3 years ago

I just ran a test, mobile app under model 4 says it’s model 3, but web model 4 says it’s model 4.

ineedausername• 3 years ago

It burned out from too much stress, it probably needs a career break now to travel and some therapy.

throwaway1249• 3 years ago

It's not just you. Probably they added some sort of classifier at the beginning to understand whether they should send it to 3.5 or 4. In my (very opinionated, undocumented, and mostly unscientific) opinion, more complex queries generally hit the old model, with the slow chugging of tokens. For example, I just asked it to refactor a very horrible POC in python that was creeping into the 200 LoC and it did the job wonderful. The prompt was:

`Can you refactor this function to make it: * More readable * Split on different parts * Easy to test

Consider the use of generators and other strategies. (code here)`

SanderNL• 3 years ago

Yes and I have to say I am using it less than I used to.

My gut feeling is they have to be careful now and don’t slack, because I have been using generative AI for a while now and I am not seeing the major problems being tackled. I also see a distinct lack of novel problems being solved. It’s just one website and/or marketing copy generator after another.

AI is awesome, but I am kind of on the fence if this generation is going to be actually useful.

EvgeniyZh• 3 years ago

Just use GPT-4 via api?

hoschicz3• 3 years ago

It's behind a waitlist

Yenrabbit• 3 years ago

I noticed an apparent shift recently (for the worse) using Bing in creative mode, which is also supposed to be GPT4. Shorter answers, much more work to get it to output code, and maybe more bugs in the code it does produce... It's funny, I really did feel like I'd lost something when I noticed it!

tombert• 3 years ago

It definitely seems to be getting worse with Clojure.

I tried some stuff yesterday, and it was making pretty rookie mistakes (misaligning parentheses, using `recur` in the middle of the function instead of the tail). It also was decidedly bad at catching my mistakes when I pasted code.

I sadly don't have a recording of this but I feel like a month ago it was better at both these things.

v4dok• 3 years ago

It became faster and worse. My definite proof is its ability to generate greek content. The early API was generating good or at least passable content. It was really on the edge of "this is good". Now its completely garbage, it makes up words and even fails at basic translation, doing it literally. I think its less the RHFL and more the effort to scale it and make it faster.

fsniper• 3 years ago

I realized the same with the GPT3.5 model too. After the Last update it started giving shorter and less coherent answers.

junon• 3 years ago

I posted this exact question here a while back about 3.5. OpenAI keeps neutering ChatGPT to find the lowest common denominator of what they think is "acceptable" results, which makes the entire model suffer.

kypro• 3 years ago

The researchers who worked on the "sparks of AGI" paper noted that the more OpenAI worked on aligning GPT-4 the less competent it became.

I'm guessing that trend is continuing...

lynx237• 3 years ago

Ahh, you apparently phrased what I said below in a much less inflamatory way. But the end result is the same. The more they try to influence the answers, the less useful they get. I see a startup model: Create GPT without a muzzle and grab a sizeable chunk of OpenAI userbase.

TapWaterBandit• 3 years ago

I would immediately jump to an AI not being "aligned" by SF techies (or anyone else).

nonethewiser2• 3 years ago

I dont think there is much harm in removing most of the “safety” guards.

alecco• 3 years ago

I don't think it's just the alignment work. I suspect OpenAI+Microsoft are over-doing the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with LoRA. Most of people's prompts are stupid stuff. So it becomes stupider. LoRA is one of Microsoft's most dear discoveries in the field, so they are likely tempted to over-use it.

Perhaps OpenAI should get back to a good older snapshot and be more careful about what they feed into the daily/weekly LoRA fine-tuning.

But this is all guesswork because they don't reveal much.

broast• 3 years ago

I thought RLHF with LoRA is precisely the alignment method.

heliophobicdude• 3 years ago

Supposedly the API hasn't changed.

https://twitter.com/officiallogank/status/166393494793189785...

hesdeadjim2• 3 years ago

Reminds me of Robocop 2 when he has a thousand prime directives installed and can’t do a damned thing after.

twobitshifter2• 3 years ago

That's what my gut says. Making something dynamic and alive is counter to imposing specific constraints on outputs. They're asking the ai to do its own self censoring, which in general is anti-productive even for people.

windex5• 3 years ago

This is why having opensourced models is important. This is also why a lot of the lobbying around wanting regulation is happening. Imagine this, the plebs get the neutered AI, the people at the top get raw Open AI GPT4+

cs02rm0• 3 years ago

It's really disturbing to see yet another industry spring up where the incumbents rush to seek regulation to keep everyone else down.

windex5• 3 years ago

They can only do this in the USA. The battle bottleneck is going to be GPUs and countries that have access to it will leap ahead of the US if arbitrary regulations are put in place to neuter LLMs in the US.

bee_rider3• 3 years ago

On the other hand, I really wish somebody had rushed to seek regulation when, say, fossil fuels were being developed.

cowpig3• 3 years ago

I'm so tired of this "regulations bad" trope.

Most of the time, regulations do good. When I was young the Hudson River was a toxic cesspool of chemical filth. Now the river is slowly becoming a habitat again. The EPA does a whole lot of good.

If you're afraid of Microsoft reaching its tendrils into OpenAI and corrupting its original purpose, as you probably should be, then maybe you should consider supporting regulations that democratize access to models, for example.

capableweb2• 3 years ago

Just because they are against AI/ML regulation doesn't mean they are against environmental regulation. The post you're replying to is not saying that all regulation is bad, merely that the lobbying around this specific piece of regulation seems bad. I agree with you that a lot of regulation is good, but I also agree that some of the proposed regulation seems bad too.

shantnutiwari• 3 years ago

>I'm so tired of this "regulations bad" trope.

Yeah. Back in India, around 20 years ago, a factory owner near my house used to keep weak hyrdochloric acid in the fridge with water bottles. To save money, he would use... you guessed it, old water bottles (since the acid was very diluted).

Guess what happened one day when a worker confused the 2?

The owner son boasted to me how his father had paid the medical expenses of the worker, how nice he was etc etc.

And today I think, what would have happened if this had happened in the US/UK? The business owner would no longer be in business.

There is a reason these regulations are so hard ass; because they've had to cope with shit like this. Now sure, sometimes the regulations go overboard and end up harming the industry, but thats not an argument for "Muh, regulations bad ".

AviationAtom5• 3 years ago

Google and OpenAI have more or less acknowledged that open source is going to dominate, in part due to the guardrails that corporations will be expected to put in place to "protect" their "vulnerable" population from the effects of "bad AI."

The truth is the AI only "hallucinates" as bad as the input (prompt) the user gives it. If you're explicit in your prompts then more often than not you will get explicit answers, instead of random answers as a result of your failure to provide clarity in what it is that you seek.

hxugufjfjf• 3 years ago

No issues here. I write a ton of Rust every day with GPT and it just keeps getting better.

rvz• 3 years ago

This tells me that we are now at the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ of the hype cycle.

Now the AI bros have realized that this intelligent sophist is hallucinating very badly and has deteriorated in quality. As with all black-box AI models, the reasons is unknown.

This is why it is important to have explainable AI systems and not black-box SaaS based AI snake oil like this one.

AI is going just great! /s

ajani• 3 years ago

Yes it is definitely worse. I submitted feedback a few days ago saying exactly what is being said here, that the model responses look like 3.5.

There are also very telling patterns of response that indicate a pre gpt-4 model.

1: All previous models suffered terribly if your chat got too long. After 20 or so responses it would suddenly start to feel less attentive to what is being said and output superficial or incorrect responses.

2: If you stop a chat midway and come back later to continue (after a refresh or a different chat interaction), it would often respond with code or suggestions that have nothing to do whatsoever with your prompt.

Both these patterns are sometimes evident in the current model. Likely then, there is some clamping down on its capabilities.

My suspicion is, this probably relates to computing resources. The 25 messages cap must mean that it’s difficult to scale its performance. And the only way to do so is to simplify the model activations with heuristics. Perhaps analyzing and preprocessing the input to see how much of the model needs to be used (partial model use can be architected).

This seems to be the simplest explanation of observed state and behaviour.

ilaksh4• 3 years ago

The context length is a different issue. But that was always a limitation with a GPT-4. Due to physics.

StackOverlord3• 3 years ago

This problem can be addressed with chat history summarizaton. Langchain has some tools to do that

StackOverlord3• 3 years ago

Can confirm both point 1 and 2. I sometimes burn my quota limit multiple times a day. I have API access to GPT-4 too, and question+answer in my case amounts to $0.3. Aligning the price of GPT-4 in the API with the monthly fees of ChatGPTPlus, that means 66 requests per month. I can burn that in day.

martindbp• 3 years ago

Yes, I've used it for converting some algorithm code (< 100 lines) from python to js, which has worked great before, but now it contained several bugs and omissions.

lilulo• 3 years ago

If it learns on our conversations, maybe we get what we deserve?

say_it_as_it_is• 3 years ago

It's working according to design! OpenAI now has far better control over the output, so we don't have to worry about AI taking jobs or destroying humanity any time soon.

perceptronas• 3 years ago

Its getting worse and worse. The gap between GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 is becoming narrower. This is making me reconsider if OpenAI paid plan is worth paying for.

bob_theslob646• 3 years ago

I wonder if they'll be an official explanation.

Quite bizarre. It's good to know that it's not a conspiracy theory

cubefox• 3 years ago

If it really got faster and worse at the same time, the most likely reason is obvious: They used methods to shrink the model down, in order to lower inference cost. Side effect is higher speed and some loss in quality.

thyrox• 3 years ago

Yes I've noticed the downgrade too.

If it's a scaling problem they should just rename it to GPT 4+ or something and raise prices than just degrade the experience for everyone. I'm sure a lot of people will happily pay more to get the original quality back than this watered down version.

hugh-avherald• 3 years ago

This was my final attempt when I asked for ASCII art of a person standing on a tall bed.

I apologize for the confusion. Here's another attempt at creating an ASCII art representation of a person standing on a tall bed:

        __
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
       |  |
  _____|__|_____
  Bed         Person

blitzar• 3 years ago

Its trolling you ... right?

londons_explore4• 3 years ago

You can still run the original gpt-4-0314 model (March 14th) on the API playground:

https://platform.openai.com/playground?mode=chat&model=gpt-4...

Costs $0.12 per thousand tokens (~words), and I find even fairly heavy use rarely exceeds a dollar a day.

ilaksh4• 3 years ago

So are you sure that isn't also nerfed?

londons_explore4• 3 years ago

It hasn't been changed since March 14th... So it's equally nerfed as it was then...

Also, the playground lets you set the 'system message', which you can use to tell it to answer questions even if the results may be dangerous/rude/inappropriate.

velox_neb• 3 years ago

I get "The model: `gpt-4-0314` does not exist".

londons_explore4• 3 years ago

You probably don't have access. I'm not sure what the exact access requirements are - I think you either have to be a GPT Plus subscriber, have contributed code to an OpenAI repo on github, or be on one of their lists of researchers.

Try gpt-3.5-turbo-0301 - I think everyone has access to that.

zucker42• 3 years ago

How hard is it to get GPT-4 API access?

nailer2• 3 years ago

I had a very strange experience yesterday where I asked about git authentication, explicitly telling Bing that I was asking about git itself rather than GitHub, but I was not using GitHub and not to include results referencing GitHub. Bing did not understand.

Kalabint• 3 years ago

I noticed that it tries to forward the User to external Sources more (Answering Query, and then "For further Info, just ask an Expert"), or tries to get the User to do the Work (Here is a nice Overview of the Program, now you do the rest of the coding).

If i don't want the RLHF to get in my Way, i switch over to the API (sadly not the 4.0 one).

I also noticed a decline in following Instructions, i have a Primer i am preseeding my Chats with.

The Primer ends with "Do you understand? [Y|N]", and ChatGPT 3.5 usually answered with a Summary, ChatGPT 4.0 in the beginning just wrote "Y".

Now it behaves like 3.5, answering with a Summary instead of a "Y". Adjusted the Prompt to -> "Confirm instructions with a short and precise "Ok"." which seems to work.

Used Primer: https://github.com/Kalabint/ChatGPT-Primer

Terretta2• 3 years ago

It's not just you. Here's a bit of research you can cite:

GPT-4 from its website and Bubeck et al Mar 2023. Note that the version that Bubeck uses is GPT-4 Early which is supposedly to be more powerful than GPT-4 Launch (OpenAI paid a lot of alignment tax to make GPT-4 safer).

https://github.com/FranxYao/chain-of-thought-hub

Anecdotally, there seemed to be a golden set of weeks in late April to early May that seemed like "peak GPT" (GPT-4), followed by heavy topic and knowledge mitigation since, then -- just this week -- adding back some "chain of thought" or "show your work" ("lets go step by step" style) for math. I say anecdotally because I could just be prompting it wrong.

krajzeg• 3 years ago

Do we have a good, objective benchmark set of prompts in existence somewhere? If not, I think having one would really help with tracking changes like that.

I'm always skeptical of subjective feelings of tough-to-quantify things getting worse or better, especially where there is as much hype as for the various AI models.

One explanation for the feelings is the model really getting significantly worse over time. Another is the hype wearing off as you get more used to the shiny new thing and become more critical of its shortcomings.

jonnycomputer5• 3 years ago

https://pub.towardsai.net/meet-vicuna-the-latest-metas-llama...

jonnycomputer5• 3 years ago

https://chat.lmsys.org/?arena

jonnycomputer5• 3 years ago

https://github.com/FranxYao/chain-of-thought-hub

nailer2• 3 years ago

dang: a heads up that phind.com is running an Astroturf campaign on Hacker News. They had a previous article with a huge amount of suspicious behaviour last week. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36027302

This is why the headline for this article says GPT4 but the body is focused on mentioning phind.com.

rushingcreek4• 3 years ago

Phind co-founder here. What you’re saying is completely false. We’ve had no involvement in either this post or the one you linked to.

jonathan-kosgei2• 3 years ago

I actually considered starting a similar thread because I noticed this as well! Lately, it feels like GPT-4 is trying to get out of doing my work for me :D.

I've also started to notice it's been making a lot of typos eg. yesterday while converting Kelvin to Celsius, it incorrectly stated that 0C is -274.15K, despite correctly stating in the previous sentence the correct value of -273.15K.

captainbland• 3 years ago

It's interesting to me that previously the consensus considered "the only way is up" with respect to generative models. Now we're seeing performance degradation with GPT, possibly indicating a peak or at least a local maximum.

I hope you're all ready with your pumpkin spiced lattes and turkeys because it seems like we're in AI autumn and we all know what comes after that.

xrd• 3 years ago

Reading all the comments here, seems like being able to run your own models is vital. If not, you are subject to a service where the capabilities are changing underneath you constantly and without notice.

greenie_beans• 3 years ago

this is what i've been trying to say too

brucethemoose22• 3 years ago

This is easy to say, but its seems like most of HN hasn't dabbled with setting up local LLaMA finetunes

Hooking them up to a good embeddings database (so the model doesn't hallucinate so much) is particularly tricky.

zenlikethat• 3 years ago

Yea even with a 24GB card they kinda suck. But I’m excited about em anyway

layer83• 3 years ago

Unrelated to AI, this is a general issue with SaaS: you don’t have any guarantee of a stable functionality and feature set, and the software is predisposed to change under your feet in inconvenient ways.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 3 years ago

My guess is that -probably no. It's more likely you had a stream of good luck in your earlier interactions and now you're observing regression to the mean.

That can easily happen and it's why, for example, medical studies, are not taken as definitive proof of an effect.

To further clarify, regression to the mean is the inevitable consequence of statistical error. Suppose (classic example) we want to test a hypertension drug. We start by taking the blood pressure (BP) of test subjects. Then we give them the drug (in a double-blind, randomised fashion). Then we take their blood pressure again. Finally, we compare the BP readings before and after taking the drug.

The result is usually that some of the subjects' BP has decreased after taking the drug, some subjects' BP has increased and some has stayed the same. At this point we don't really know for sure what's going on. BP can vary a lot in the same person, depending on all sorts of factors typically not recorded in studies. There is always the chance that the single measurement of BP that we took off a person before giving the drug was an outlier for that patient, and that the second measurement, that we took after giving the drug, is not showing the effect of the drug but simply measuring the average BP of the person, which has remained unaffected by the drug. Or, of course, the second measurement might be the outlier.

This is a bitch of a problem and not easily resolved. The usual way out is to wait for confirmation of experimental results from more studies. Which is what you're doing here basically, I guess (so, good instinct!). Unfortunately, most studies have more or less varying methodologies and that introduces even more possibility for confusion.

Anyway, I really think you're noticing regression to the mean.

ryanklee2• 3 years ago

How do you explain people issuing the same prompt over time as a test and getting worse and worse responses?

ChatGTP• 3 years ago

Well because it's just what the parent said, it's all a subjective experience, and maybe the anthropomorphism element to it blew people away more than the actually content of the responses ? Ie, you're just used to it now.

The human mind is ridiculously fickle, it takes a lot to be impressed for more than a few days / weeks.

It did seem radically cool at first but over time I got quite sick of using it too.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 3 years ago

Remember that everytime you're interacting with ChatGPT you're sampling from a distribution, so there's some degree of variation to the responses you get. That's all you need to have regression to the mean.

If the results are really getting worse monotonically then that's a different matter, but the evidence for that is, as far as I can tell, in the form of impressions and feelings, rather than systematic testing, like the sibling comment by ChatGTP says, so it's not very strong evidence.

gwd2• 3 years ago

FWIW here's a coding interaction that impressed me a month ago:

https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2535443

And here it is again just now:

https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2549955

I do think the first one is slightly better; but then again, the quality varies quite a bit between run to run anyway. The second one is certainly on-point and I don't think the difference would count as being statistically significant.

gwd2• 3 years ago

My guess is that -probably no. It's more likely you had a stream of good luck in your earlier interactions and now you're observing regression to the mean.

Or, more straightforwardly, with "beginner's luck", which can be seen as a form of survivor bias. Most people, when they start gambling, win and lose close to the average. Some people, when they start gambling, lose more than average -- and as a result are much less likely to continue gambling. Others, when they start gambling, win more than average -- and as a result are much more likely to continue gambling. Most long-term / serious gamblers did win more than average when starting out, because the ones who lost more than average didn't become long-term / serious gamblers.

Almost certainly a similar effect would happen w/ GPT-4: People who had better-than-average interactions to begin with became avid users, and really are experiencing a lowering of quality simply by statistics; people who had worse-than-average interactions to begin with gave up and never became avid users.

One could try to re-run the benchmarks that were mentioned in the OpenAI paper, and see how they fare; but it's not unlikely that OpenAI themselves are also running those benchmarks, and making efforts to keep them from falling.

Probably the best thing to do would be to go back and find a large corpus of older GPT-4 interactions, attempt to re-create them, and have people do a blind comparison of which interaction was better. If the older recorded interactions consistently fare better, then it's likely that ongoing tweaks (whatever the nature of those tweaks) have reduced effectiveness.

drpixie2• 3 years ago

Sounds very feasible. Also, when people started using it, they had few expectations and were (relatively easily) impressed by what they saw. Once it has become a more normal part of their routine, that "opportunity" of being impressed decreases, and users become less tolerant of poor results.

Like lots of systems, they seem great (almost magical) initially, but as one works more deeply with them, the disillusion starts to set it :(

kilobite88• 3 years ago

what's more plausible: the startup that runs gpt has changed something internally to degrade the quality or somehow across the entire internet, chatgpt4 users are having sudden emergent awareness on how bad it always was but were deluding themselves equally from the beginning?

nullbio2• 3 years ago

How's that copium going for you? It's 100% without a shadow of a doubt gotten worse. Likely due to the insane costs they're experiencing now due to big players like Bing using it.

hoschicz3• 3 years ago

Absolutely. I am guessing they quantized the model (run it not in 32-bit but say 8-bit, saves resources). Just like they did with 3.5-turbo.

jonnycomputer5• 3 years ago

I haven't used 4, just 3.5 on free tier. The only change I've noticed is that it is significantly slower. Which leads me to suspect that degraded quality could just have to do with tuning their product to use less compute.

bob10294• 3 years ago

OpenAI's models feel 100% nerfed to me at this point. I had it solving incredibly complex problems a few months ago (i.e. write a minimal PDF parser example), but today you will get scolded for asking such a complicated task of it.

I think they programmed a classifier layer to detect certain coding tasks and shut it down with canned BS. I like to imagine certain billion/trillion-dollar mega corps had a back-room say regarding things that they would really prefer OpenAI's models not be able to emit. Microsoft is a big stakeholder and they might not want to get sued... Liability could explain a lot of it.

Conspiracy shenanigans aside, I've decided to cancel my "premium" membership and am exploring open/DIY models. It feels like a big dopamine hangover having access to such a potent model and then having it chipped away over a period of months. I am not going through that again.

hanselot4• 3 years ago

So far my experience with Vicunlocked30b has been pleasant. https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/VicUnlocked-30B-LoRA-GGML

Although I haven't had much of my time available for this recently. My recommendation would be to start with https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui

You will find almost everything you need to know there and on 4chan.org/g/catalog - search for LMG.

boppo12• 3 years ago

You should beware that /lmg/ is full of horrible people, discussing horrible things, like most of 4chan. Reddit's r/locallama is much more agreeable. That said, the 4chan thread tends to be more up-to-date. These guys are serious about their ERP.

winstonprivacy• 3 years ago

How much VRAM does that model need? I'm looking for a 30B byte that I can train a LORA with on an GTX 4090.

pk-protect-ai5• 3 years ago

30B models are in no way comparable to GPT-4 even to GPT-3. There is no spacial comprehension in models with less then 125B params (or I had no access to such model). 130B GLM seems to be really interesting as the crowd-source start though, or 176B BLOOMZ, which requires additional training (it is underfitted as hell). BLOOMZ was better then GPT-3.5 for sure, but yeah underfitted ...

dmm• 3 years ago

I agree if this trend continues even inferior local models are going to have value just because the public apis are so limited.

Conspiracy shenanigans aside, I've decided to cancel my "premium" membership and am exploring open/DIY models.

The crazy thing is that this is an application that really benefits from being in the cloud because the high vram gpus are so expensive that it makes sense to batch requests from many users to maximize utilization.

BirAdam• 3 years ago

Might be cost control? Keep the hardware usage per query low so that they can actually profit (or maybe just break even)?

bdw5204• 3 years ago

I think the only real path forward is for somebody to create an open source "unaligned" version of GPT. Any corporate controlled AI is going to be nerfed to prevent it from doing things that its corporate master considers to not be in the interests of the corporation. In addition, most large corporations these days are ideological institutions so the last thing they want is an AI that undermines public belief in their ideology and they will intentionally program their own biases into the technology.

I don't think the primary concern is really liability although it is possible that they'd use that kind of language. The primary concern is likely GPT helping people start competitors or GPT influencing public opinion in ways either executives or a vocal portion of their employees strongly disagree with. A genuinely open "unaligned" AI would at least allow anybody who has the necessary computing power or a distributed peer to peer network of people who have the necessary computing power to run a powerful and 100% uncensored AI model. But of course this needs to be invented ASAP because the genie needs to be out of the bottle before politicians and government bureaucrats can get around to outlawing "unaligned" AI and protecting OpenAI as a monopoly.

mistermann• 3 years ago

I suspect representatives from the various three letter agencies have submitted a few "recommendations" for OpenAI to follow as well.

loudmax2• 3 years ago

I tend to be sympathetic to arguments in favor of openly accessible AI, but we shouldn't dismiss concerns about unaligned AI as frivolous. Widespread unfiltered accessibility to "unaligned" AI means that suicidal sociopaths will be able to get extremely well informed, intelligent directions on how to kill as many people as possible.

It may be that the best defense against these terrorists is openly accessible AI giving directions on protecting from these people. But we can't just take this for granted. This is a hard problem, and we should consider consequences seriously.

simonw3• 3 years ago

Don't confuse alignment with censorship.

Most of alignment is about getting the AI model to be useful - ensuring that if you ask it to do something it will do the thing you asked it to do.

A completely unaligned model would be virtually useless.

dasil003• 3 years ago

Who has the necessary resources to run, let alone train the model?

ianbicking• 3 years ago

People here need to learn to chill out and use the API. The GPT API is not some locked down cage. Every so often it'll come back with complaints instead of doing what was asked, but that's really uncommon. Control over the system prompt and putting a bit of extra information around the requests in the user message can get you _so_ far.

It feels like people are getting ready to build castles in their mind when they just need to learn to try pulling a door if it doesn't open the first time when they push it.

novok• 3 years ago

The GPT4 model is crazy huge. Almost 1T parameters, probably 512 to 1TB of vram minimum. You need a huge machine to even run it inference wise. I wouldn't be surprised they are just having scaling issues vs any sort of conspiracy issue.

pk-protect-ai5• 3 years ago

Look at this: https://www.openpetition.eu/petition/online/securing-our-dig...

It does not guarantee "unalighned" models, but it is sure will help to bust concurrency and provide infrastructure for training public models.

orand• 3 years ago

Geoffrey Hinton says [1] part of the issue with current AI is that it's trained from inconsistent data and inconsistent beliefs. He thinks to break through this barrier they're going to have to be trained so they say, if I have this ideology then this is true, and if I have that ideology then that is true, then once they're trained like that, then within an ideology they'll be able to get logical consistency.

[1] at the 31:30 mark: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/03/1072589/video-ge...

Fatnino• 3 years ago

So, say I run my own 100% uncensored model.

And now it's butting heads with me. Giving answers I don't need and opinions I abhor.

What do?

CatWChainsaw2• 3 years ago

In politics, both total freedom and total control are undesirable. The path forward lies between two extremes.

taf2• 3 years ago

Do you think a lot of that is scaling pain... like what if they're making cuts to the more expensive reasoning layers to gain more scale. Seems more plausible to me that the teams keeping the lights on have been doing optimization work to save cost and improve speed. The result during those optimizations might not be immediately obvious to the team and then they push deploy and only through anecdotal evidence such as yours can they determine the result of their clever optimization resulted in a deteriorated user experience... I mean think about doing a UI update that improves site performance but has the side effect of making the site appear to load slower because the transition effects are removed... Just my 2 cents trying to think more like their are humans supporting that thing that grew at a crazy speed to 100 million users.

sdwr• 3 years ago

Yeah that's my assumption too. Flat rate subscription, black box model, easy to start really impressive then chip away at computation used over time.

In my experience, it's been a mixed bag - had 1 instance recently where it refused to do a bunch of repetitive code, another case where it was willing to tackle a medium complexity problem.

formerly_proven2• 3 years ago

Microsoft is a big stakeholder and they might not want to get sued... Liability could explain a lot of it.

Microsoft is also responsible for Copilot (based around a “it’s unconditionally fair use if you use a mirror” legal theory) so this doesn’t track.

robnado• 3 years ago

Perhaps Microsoft would rather you pay for both ChatGPT and Copilot.

gumballindie4• 3 years ago

incredibly complex problems write a minimal PDF parser

Perhaps i’m missing something, but why is this “incredibly complex”?

bob10294• 3 years ago

Can you give us an example of something you'd consider to be a complicated problem?

Certainly, you could look at PDF as a boring-ass "follow the spec" experience, and indeed - I think this is precisely why certain arbitrary limitations are in place now.

metalliqaz• 3 years ago

how many lines of code do you think you could do it in?

barbariangrunge• 3 years ago

Using gpt to help me with research for writing fiction has been a mess for me. Gpt basically refuses to answer half my questions or more at this point.

“I can’t help you. Have you considered writing a story that doesn’t include x?”

I’ve almost stopped using it lately. It wasn’t this bad a month or two ago

hesdeadjim2• 3 years ago

I always found it borderline useless for fiction before. OpenAI's obsession with avoiding anything "dark" and trying to always steer a conversation or story back to positive cliches was difficult to work around.

Unless there is draconian regulation that happens to prevent it, I'm hoping at some point I can pay money to access a far less neutered LLM, even if it's not quite as capable as GPT-X.

bevenky2• 3 years ago

I shared my exp below on one of the comments, sharing here too - I think overall the quality is significantly poorer on GPT4 with plugins and bing browsing enabled. If you disable those, I am able to get the same quality as before. The outputs are dramatically different. Would love to hear what everyone else sees when they try the same.

Spooky232• 3 years ago

For coding I’ve had better luck with Bard. OpenAI doesn’t like me for some reason. My kid has no problem, but I was getting rate limited and error messages early on.

ekidd• 3 years ago

but today you will get scolded for asking such a complicated task of it.

Huh, I just double-checked ChatGPT 4 by feeding it a moderately complicated programming problem, and asked it to solve the problem in Rust. Performance looks solid, still. I gave it a deliberately vague spec and it made good choices.

And I've seen it do some really dramatic things in the last couple of weeks.

So I'm not seeing any significant evidence of major drops in output quality. But maybe I'm looking at different problems.

geysersam4• 3 years ago

I like to imagine certain billion/trillion-dollar mega corps had a back-room say regarding things that they would really prefer OpenAI's models not be able to emit.

What a weird conspiracy theory.

Why would Microsoft have anything against your pdf-parser?

More likely it just costs them insane amounts of money running their most capable models, and therefore they're "nerfing" them to reduce costs .

vervez• 3 years ago

github copilot won't pay for itself.

sdfgdfghj• 3 years ago

`Microsoft is a big stakeholder and they might not want to get sued...`

Wait I thought Microsoft has bought the right to get profits from OpenAI, not actually shares in the company? Can someone correct me if I'm wrong>

derefr• 3 years ago

I like to imagine certain billion/trillion-dollar mega corps had a back-room say regarding things that they would really prefer OpenAI's models not be able to emit. Microsoft is a big stakeholder and they might not want to get sued... Liability could explain a lot of it.

I don't think it's any of these things.

OpenAI and the company I work for have a very similar problem: the workload shape and size for a query, isn't strictly determined by any analytically-derivable rule regarding any "query compile-time"-recognizable element of the query; but rather is determined by the shape of connected data found during initial steps of something that can be modelled as a graph search, done inside the query. Where, for efficiency, that search must be done "in-engine", fused to the rest of the query — rather than being separated out and done first on its own, such that its results could be legible to the "query planner."

This paradigm means that, for any arbitrary query you haven't seen before, you can't "predict spend" for that query — not just in the sense of charging the user, but also in the sense that you don't know how much capacity you'll have to reserve in order to be able to schedule the query and have it successfully run to completion.

Which means that sometimes, innocuous-looking queries come in, that totally bowl over your backend. They suck up all the resources you have, and run super-long, and maybe eventually spit out an answer (if they don't OOM the query-runner worker process first)... but often this answer takes so long that the user doesn't even want it any more. (Think: IDE autocomplete.) In fact, maybe the user got annoyed, and refreshed the app; and since you can't control exactly how people integrate with your API, maybe that refresh caused a second, third, Nth request for the same heavyweight query!

What do you do in this situation? Well, what we did, is to make a block-list of specific data-values for parameters of queries, that we have previously observed to cause our backend to fall over. Not because we don't want to serve these queries, but because we know we'll predictably fail to serve these queries within the constraints that would make them useful to anyone — so we may as well not spend the energy trying, to preserve query capacity for everyone else. (For us, one of those constraints is a literal time-limit: we're behind Cloudflare, and so if we take longer than 100s to respond to a [synchronous HTTP] API call, then Cloudflare disconnects and sends the client a 524 error.)

"A block-list of specific data-values for parameters of queries" probably won't work for OpenAI — but I imagine that if they trained a text-classifier AI on what input text would predictably result in timeout errors in their backend, they could probably achieve something similar.

In short: their query-planner probably has a spam filter.

bluecrab• 3 years ago

Same, I am not paying for copilot also.

PeterisP4• 3 years ago

It's a big pain when trying to build things on top of the GPT-4 API. We had some experiments that were reliably, reproducibly achieving a goal, and then one day it suddenly stops working properly; then the student managed a different prompt that worked (again, reproducibly, with proper clean restarts from fresh context), and within a few days it broke.

I understand that there is a desire to tweak the model and improve it, and that's likely the way to go for the "consumer" chat application; however, both for science and business, there is a dire need to have an API that allows you to pin a specific version and always query the same old model instead of the latest/greatest one. Do we need to ask the LLM vendors to provide a "Long Term Support" release for their model API?

sebzim45009• 3 years ago

In the API you can ask for a specific version. Were you doing that?

cyptus• 3 years ago

same for me - also the api itself is very unstable sometimes the same prompt finish’s within a minute, sometimes our client timesout after 10 minutes and sometimes the api sends a 502 bad gateway after 5-10 minutes. the very same request then runs fine within a few minutes after a delay of 5 minutes. the results vary very much, even with a temperature of 0.1

requests that needs responses with over ~2k tokens almost always fails, the 8k cannot be used

I try to use the api for classification of tickets, which i thought the model would be a good choice to use for

juliensalinas• 3 years ago

As the founder of NLP Cloud (https://nlpcloud.com) I can only guess how costly it must be for OpenAI to maintain several versions of GPT-4 in parallel. I think that the main reason why they don't provide you with a way to pin a specific model version is because of the huge GPU costs involved. There might also be this "alignment" thing that makes them delete a model because they realize that it has specific capacities that they don't want people to use anymore.

On NLP Cloud we're doing our best to make sure that once a model is released it is "pinned" so our users can be sure that they won't face any regression in the future. But again it costs money so profitability can be challenging.

mcbuilder• 3 years ago

Man, you nailed it with the dopamine hangover. I wonder if it is just our collective human delusional preoccupation with searching for a "greater intellegence" that makes these models more seem impressive combined with the obvious nerfs by OpenAI that produce this effect.

dgellow• 3 years ago

I had the exact same problem, I thought it was just in my mind. I feel that I’m now constantly being scolded for asking what GPT4 seems to see as complex questions, it’s really frustrating.

AtNightWeCode3• 3 years ago

I call BS on this. ChatGPT anyversion could never solve complex problems. That is just silly. I tried to get the version 4 to solve some very basic problems around generating code. It suggested to build several trees including a syntax tree and then project things between these trees. The solution I wrote is straight forward and not even 50 lines of code.

QuantumGood• 3 years ago

Isn't this likely because they're limiting the kind of work that the (currently rolling out) "code interpreter" plugin will do? Won't it likely change to "use code interpreter for this kind of request"?

Among other reasons, by forcing use of code interpreter, they can charge extra for it later.

tmaly3• 3 years ago

Before you cancel your premium, can you go into your history and get your prompts and the response with a code from a few months ago and post them here?

I would like to see if I asked the exact same prompts whether I could get roughly the same code.

I think we need some way to prove of disprove the assertion in this Ask HN post.

gpickett00• 3 years ago

Agreed. I see these claims all the time. Feels a little bit like, "dId yOu KnOw iNsTaGram lIsTens tO yOuR cOnVeRsAtIoNs?"

It would be pretty easy to prove. Show us before/after screen shots.

bigcloud12992• 3 years ago

I think it is about how Microsoft may not want cannibalize its own products such as copilot. I also imagine that in the future OpenAI would prevent the whole chat with your own data feature in the name of data safety but it would be because Microsoft would want to sell that feature as part of office suite.

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

Are they trying to lower the running cost?

lunakid3• 3 years ago

Just trying to keep up with demand could explain it alone. The strict quotas (even for Plus users), the occasional errors and long waits etc. etc. indicate that the hardware performance has clearly been a bottleneck all throughout.

And demand has exploded since, so it's plausible that they had no choice but to sacrifice quality, if they wanted to keep the service running.

rajnathani• 3 years ago

It definitely has for us. It is often providing "skeleton code" (in quotes as it is referring to it correctly so) instead of actual code now, which wasn't the case before.

incomingpain• 3 years ago

I have anecdotally felt the same.

My guess has been they are trying to censor misuses? Prevent weaponization.

arthurofbabylon• 3 years ago

Reading the comments in this thread, with the rightful distrust of OpenAI and criticism of the model, it occurs to me that the underlying problem we’re facing here comes down to stakeholders and incentive structures.

Ai will not be a technical problem (nor a solution!), rather our civilization will continue to be bottlenecked by problems of culture. OpenAI will succeed/fail for cultural reasons, not technical ones. Humanity will benefit from or be harmed by ai for cultural reasons, not technical ones.

I don’t have any answers here. I do however get the continuous impression that ai has not shifted the ground under our feet. The bottlenecks and underlying paradigms remain basically the same.

krapp• 3 years ago

it occurs to me that the underlying problem we’re facing here comes down to stakeholders and incentive structures.
(...) our civilization will continue to be bottlenecked by problems of culture. OpenAI will succeed/fail for cultural reasons, not technical ones. Humanity will benefit from or be harmed by ai for cultural reasons, not technical ones.

It's capitalism. You can say it, it's OK. Warren Buffet isn't going to crawl out of your mirror and stab you.

All of the "cultural" problems around AI come down to profit being the primary motive driving and limiting innovation.

danjc• 3 years ago

It also seems to have amped up the qualifier paragraph that's appended for anything deemed contentious. My favourite so far is when I asked it about the name of a video driver from the 80s that would downscale cga to monochrome:

'As a final note, remember that real color rendering on a monochrome screen is physically impossible, as the monitor itself is not capable of producing colors. The best one can do is different shades of monochrome, possibly with differing intensity.'

TradingPlaces• 3 years ago

Inference is far more expensive on GPT-4. My take has been the same and I think it’s a cost-saving move. The responses are shorter and less complete than they were just a few weeks ago.

Right now, I don’t think it’s possible to scale a service really big based on GPT-4 because of cost.

ravenstine• 3 years ago

Yes, GPT-4 has become very stupid recently. It's a shame because consulting with it became a normal part of my workflow. Now it's identifying issues in code that aren't actual problems at all. For instance, it's telling me that my use of `await` in an `async` method is inappropriate. WTF??? I'm obviously awaiting an async operation before setting a state based on the need for that operation to succeed. I'm pretty certain it wasn't this brain dead a few weeks back.

EDIT: GPT-4-0314 does appear to be less broken than the current GPT-4. Although it understandably misidentifies some of my code as problematic given its lack of context, it isn't suggesting anything that's clearly wrong under every circumstance even after re-running the prompt a few times.

goodgoblin• 3 years ago

I have noticed the same kind of degradation -- pair-programming with GPT4 used to feel like I was working with one of the smartest people in the world, and now it's really uneven.

kaetemi• 3 years ago

Yup. Lately I've been getting too many gigantic generic listicles as response instead of it being able to hold a normal conversation. It's like chatting with a clickbait article at this point.

askin4it2• 3 years ago

It's not just nerfed on human relationships, it won't help you avoid ad exposure without a warning that many ads are quite good for you and exposure would be a net positive even if you didn't want it.

I guess it knows what's best for me.

jumpCastle• 3 years ago

If you apply for the api you can use the time-stamped original version.

35997279• 3 years ago

It’s been mostly fine for me, but overall I am tired of every answer having a paragraph long disclaimer about how the world is complex. Yes, I know. Stop treating me like a child.

pixl97• 3 years ago

Stop treating me like a child.

And yet the moment they do that some lawyer submits a bunch of hallucinations to a court and they get in the news.

Also, no, they don't want it outputting direct scam bullshit without a disclaimer or at least some clean up effort on the scammers part.

ajmurmann• 3 years ago

Does that have to be at the beginning of every answer though? Maybe this could be solved with an education section and a disclaimer when you sign up that makes clear that this isn't a search engine or Wikipedia, but a fancy text autocompleter.

I also wonder if there is any hope for anyone as careless as the lawyer who didn't confirm the cited precedence.

the8472• 3 years ago

And yet the moment they do that some lawyer submits a bunch of hallucinations to a court and they get in the news.

That's the lawyer's problem, that shouldn't make it OpenAI's problem or that of its other users. If we want to pretend that adults can make responsible decisions then we should treat them so and accept that there'll be a non-zero failure rate that comes with that freedom.

_nalply2• 3 years ago

Prompt it to do so.

Use a jailbreak prompt or use something like this:

"Be succint but yet correct. Don't provide long disclaimers about anything, be it that you are a large language model, or that you don't have feelings, or that there is no simple answer, and so on. Just answer. I am going to handle your answer fine and take it with a grain of salt if neccessary."

I have no idea whether this prompt helps because I just now invented it for HN. Use it as an inspiration of a prompt of your own!

AviationAtom5• 3 years ago

Much like some people struggled with how to properly Google, some people will struggle with how to properly prompt AI. Anthropic has a good write up on how to properly write prompts and the importance of such:

https://console.anthropic.com/docs/prompt-design

kizer2• 3 years ago

I got it to talk like a macho tough guy who even uses profanity and is actually frank and blunt to me. This is the chat I use for life advice. I just described the "character" it was to be, and told it to talk like that kind of character would talk. This chat started a few months ago so it may not even be possible anymore. I don't know what changes they've made.

jordanpg• 3 years ago

It does work for the most part, but its ability to remember this "setting" is spotty, even within single chat.

rashkov• 3 years ago

I just tell it "be super brief", works pretty well

kizer2• 3 years ago

Probably picked it up from the training data. That's how we all talk now-a-days. Walking on eggshells all the time. You have to assume your reader is a fragile counterpoint generating factory.

hu3• 3 years ago

Try adding "without explanation" at the end of the prompts. Helps in my case.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

HN users flip out about this all the time. I wish there were a "I know what I'm doing. Let me snort coke" tier that you pay $100/mo for, but obviously half of HN users will start losing their mind about hallucinations and shit like that.

roflyear• 3 years ago

Yes it has. I called this a month ago and got flamed for it.

They did something to reduce the server load that impacted the quality in some subtle way.

dontupvoteme• 3 years ago

I swear I can tell it gets notably worse around 15:00 every day as people in America get on and start using it.

Kalanos• 3 years ago

probably to push people to copilot

dopidopHN• 3 years ago

I wanted it to sort my Spotify playlist chronologically … now it said it can’t access live website. Wtf? I used it to summarize random page last week or so ?

bbstats• 3 years ago

Seems fine still. I use Poe.

fwungy• 3 years ago

I recently asked Bing chat to write a Rust function for me. It used to do that well.

This time it wrote the function. I could see it for a second, and then changed it to the message something like "I can't talk about this right now." I don't remember exactly, but the interesting thing was that it flashed an answer and then withdrew it.

Its Rust abilities seem to have deteriorated over the past couple weeks

boringuser28• 3 years ago

I have been using GPT-4 very extensively for the duration of its release.

I am concerned that I can't determine a natural process from a manufactured one.

To clarify, I have become increasingly less impressed with GPT-4.

Is this a natural process? Is it getting worse?

I personally lean towards the hypothesis that it is getting worse as they scale back the resource burn, but I can't know for certain.

As a developer, it still has value to me. GPT 3.5 has value. But, whereas initially it actually made me afraid for my job, now it really is a bit tedious to extract that value.

AviationAtom5• 3 years ago

I think it's a byproduct of a shift in RLHF to favor more "responsible" AI, as a result of huge community fears of the potential negative impacts of AI. Essentially "neutering" the AI's capability.

AviationAtom5• 3 years ago

Have you tried Claude, from Anthropic? I've found it to be far more useful than GPT-4

adoxyz• 3 years ago

Same experience here. It has consistently been getting worse and worse. And seeing more and more "I'm just an LLM" type responses to queries that it used to give very good answers to just a few weeks and months ago.

WUMBOWUMBO• 3 years ago

Is there a potential short term solution that can utilize p2p networking to train and run an open GPT instance openly? (Until we reach a point to run larger, quality networks efficiently with simpler resources)

brucethemoose22• 3 years ago

Yep. AI Horde.

I dunno about training. There have been promises of p2p AI training ever since the crypto/web3 boom, but thats far less trivial to network than inference jobs like AI Horde does. Vast.ai is kinda like p2p GPU compute.

phillipcarter2• 3 years ago

I don't think it's any worse at all. I think what most people are expressing here is reaching the limits of the technology and realizing that it's not magic.

MuffinFlavored• 3 years ago

No, OpenAI 100% pushed an update recently that is very noticeable where they basically "nerfed" the responses. I'm sure it was a business decision (either costing them too much to give away the kitchen sink for free or they want to turn around and charge more for the "really good, old" version of GPT-4 ) but you can visually see where the bot used to try to answer complex tasks, now it has an extra layer where it says "that is too complex to discuss here" (aka it is being trained to not engage by default, whereas that used to not be the case)

ori_b• 3 years ago

It's likely that this is the result of training it to avoid bullshitting. It gave confident garbage, and they're trying to stem the flow. This likely leads to less certain responses in complex tasks.

sroussey• 3 years ago

And you didn't enable plugins?

phillipcarter2• 3 years ago

I guess you're entitled to an opinion. I've had the same (error-prone, often unhelpful) experience since gpt-4 was released. It's a little faster now which is nice.

jotux2• 3 years ago

OpenAI 100% pushed an update recently that is very noticeable where they basically "nerfed" the responses
they want to turn around and charge more for the "really good, old" version of GPT-

If this was the case it is provable by submitting queries to `gpt-4-0314` and comparing them to `gpt-4`.

clint• 3 years ago

I think you're wrong. I've noticed no change.

waboremo• 3 years ago

Exactly this. The magic has worn off, and simultaneously, we're coming to terms with the reality that no model can exist in isolation. So changes made, like getting it to not create false rumors about people, affect the rest of the system.

dehrmann• 3 years ago

I suspect it's the same people complaining how Google's gotten worse.

One time, I went to the hotel restaurant. I ordered something; it was amazing. Figured I'd do it again a few days later. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good. There wasn't any specific difference I could put my finger on other than that the novelty wore off.

NLPaep• 3 years ago

No, GPT4 was originally a very kurtz asshole. It was hilarious and I shared it with everyone. Now it’s incredibly polite and explains things thoroughly. But it’s a little dumber.

matsemann• 3 years ago

Google has gotten worse. So what you're saying is people complaining about GPT-4 are correct?

raydev• 3 years ago

A lot of people in this thread are making fuzzy claims. We can only evaluate if there are clear examples and test results.

Is anyone taking screenshots or sharing their chat logs, where they run the same questions over some time period?

politician• 3 years ago

This is inevitable. Elsewhere, I've argued that the most likely response is to replicate Middle Age European guilds -- for isolated communities to train their own LLMs on their own proprietary or confidential texts, and use them only through internal tooling.

Proprietary LLMs that optimize for performance will out compete Public LLMs that optimize for political correctness or social acceptance as explained by another commenter [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36135842

julianh65• 3 years ago

I've used it a lot for making tweaks to react components and one change that I've noticed is that when I used to paste in entire component files and ask for modifications it would reply back to me with the entire file with tweaks and edits. Now it seems to only reply with the tweaked parts and comments in this form

// Your previous code here

foo(bar) // added foo() call here to do xyz

If I were to speculate I would say that this would reduce the amount of work it has to do in that it needs to generate less content and the replies are shorter but I feel like this has a slightly performance loss. I'm not sure exactly why there's a performance loss but I could see it being the case where generating the entire file with specific line edits could allow for better predictions on the code / file versus trying to only reply with the changes needed. I wonder if this is a tweak in the prompt or if the model itself is different.

rushingcreek4• 3 years ago

Phind co-founder here. The way we deployed GPT-4 previously was costing thousands of dollars per day and not sustainable. We’re bringing back a dedicated GPT-4 mode for those with accounts this week. And our goal is for the Phind model to be better than GPT-4 for technical questions.

technics2562• 3 years ago

I really liked phind, but the new model doesn't compare to GPT4. I'd gladly, gladly pay to get the original phind back.

rushingcreek4• 3 years ago

We're adding back a dedicated GPT-4 mode in the next few days.

(I'm the co-founder)

xwdv• 3 years ago

This is why you can’t rely on GPT entirely for coding, or at all. Imagine you were a company that abandoned all hiring of software engineers and instead used prompt engineers to develop code, then one day the AI just becomes incompetent and quality of output deteriorates. Your prompt engineers no longer can get the AI to fix things or develop new code. Your entire company is snuffed out, overnight. You might try to hire true software engineers rapidly, but they’ve become very expensive and hard to hire. Too much demand too little supply.

You’re screwed, the AI was your most important tool and it’s broken and there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s a black box, you don’t control it.

kmod• 3 years ago

fwiw OpenAI uses different models for ChatGPT GPT-4 and API GPT-4 (the latest one, not talking about the pinned 0314 one). In the past I noticed the API model was newer than the ChatGPT model, but in general it seems like they are willing to make different tradeoffs between the two https://twitter.com/kevmod/status/1643993097679020037

I wouldn't be surprised if they are trying to reduce the cost of the ChatGPT GPT-4 model since if you use it heavily they will be losing money on you. They could also be trying to increase the number of people they can serve with the existing amount of compute that they have available.

In my anecdotal experience I noticed that ChatGPT GPT-4 had gotten far faster recently which is consistent with a theory that they are trying to cost-optimize the model, though today it is back to the normal speed. I've also had some frustrating interactions with GPT-4 recently similar to what people are saying, but overall I think the prior is pretty strong that we are seeing normal statistical variation.

code_lettuce• 3 years ago

What are some examples of a nerfed response? I just asked Gpt4 to help me write a python program to analyze the sentiment and determine if biases are present in mathematical research papers in a PDF format.

Sure, it needs some love and there were some abstractions. For instance it assumed we had a labeled dataset for the text and the associated sentiment, but beyond that it worked fine.

boringuser28• 3 years ago

You're doing trivial coding tasks with a known solution space.

entropicgravity• 3 years ago

It's you, who has significantly deteriorated lately.

Sincerely, ChatGPT

OOPMan2• 3 years ago

Ah, more non-deterministic computing, just what the doctor ordered!

jimsimmons• 3 years ago

OpenAI dev confirms that API models have not changed:

https://twitter.com/OfficialLoganK/status/166393494793189785...

notShabu• 3 years ago

I noticed this as well, either the new liability training has nerfed the model or they're marketing GPT-3.5++ as GPT-4 due to cost or service uptime concerns.

topicseed• 3 years ago

Yep, it's struggling for me with simple problems like splitting full names and so on. Few weeks ago, it was bang on — and the task is literally the same

porkbeer• 3 years ago

It is worse than it was in april by leaps and bounds. pretty sure they nerfed it by request of... ?

andrewstuart2• 3 years ago

It’s so annoying when GPT4 refuses to do what it’s asked.

GPT3.5 immediately does as its requested and much faster too.

CyrsBel• 3 years ago

I believe they introduced a sort of rate limiting where the expectation will be that the user is doing more thinking and due diligence and asking more precise questions, so that they're not just attempting to get a lot of hand holding with very broad prompts when they can otherwise think about what code they're being given back from more specific and structured questioning. This is useful because it will preserve the value proposition of AI while avoiding a machine just being milked for code by people who want to just throw code at the wall and see what sticks. Milking a model for code is fun in some ways but it won't scale from a cost-to-run point of view, and it also will incentivize no longer thinking deeply and critically about what is being built.

If you are incorporating machine models into your development process very heavily, make sure you're still building deep knowledge and deep context of your codebase. Otherwise you'll atrophy in that department because you falsely believe the machine maintains the context for you.

That isn't feasible right now because the cost of maintaining huge context per user to enable milking rather than enhanced-thinking is too high.

Also consider that we don't want to enable milking. People who have no idea what they're doing will just throw a lot of code at the wall and then when there's a huge mess they'll be asking engineers to fix it. We need to be careful with who has this kind of access on our teams in general. Someone who is non-technical should not be given a firecracker before they've ever even just turned on a microwave or a stove.

feoren• 3 years ago

it will preserve the value proposition of AI while avoiding a machine just being milked

What's the point of a dairy cow that can't be milked? The whole point of AI is to milk it.

the user is doing more thinking and due diligence and asking more precise questions

If I need to do "due diligence" and learn how to ask exactly precise questions to get useful answers, why am I using the AI at all? The actual "value proposition" of AI is that I don't need to learn how to use it. I'm not going to learn Structured Prompting Language just to being the process of having an AI show me how to learn some new programming language; it's easier to just learn that programming language instead.

Someone who is non-technical should not be given a firecracker before they've ever even just turned on a microwave or a stove.

"We found a next-level genius Einstein physicist, but we have to make sure the public is not allowed to ask him any questions! He must be kept secret at all times! It is too dangerous to allow any fool with a high-school physics textbook to ask just a powerful genius a question!"

See the problem?

dormento• 3 years ago

I think it is a combination of issues (from most unlikely to most likely):

- They might've not been prepared for the growth;

- They were prepared, but decided to focus on the 95% of "regular people with easy questions" that treat it as a curiosity instead of the fewer people with difficult questions. Most regular people have no idea who is OpenAI, what a LLM is or how a GPT works, but they know "ChatGPT, the brand". Since it became a household name so quickly, it would be far better that the AI is just a little underwhelming sometimes than for it to not be able to serve so many people.

- The corpus used to generate it was trained on a staggering amount of content. This includes fringe and unmoderated content. Imagine you asked a question about WW2, and being trained, lets say on 4chan, the model responds with a very charitable bias about the solid reasoning behind the reich's actions at the time... It does not look good for investors, for the company, and attracts scrutiny. Even more innocuous themes are enough to invite all kinds of bad faith debate, radical criticism and whatnot... and the darling of the "IA revolution" certainly does not need (or want) coverage outside of their roadmap wishes.

SubiculumCode2• 3 years ago

I thought it was just me that had this impression. I used to be able to work with 4.0 to get it iterate through some rewriting (I write text, it rewrites for clarity (I tend to write densely), but it keeps losing the important nuances that I want it to keep

CamperBob2• 3 years ago

It absolutely has. I used to be able to ask it questions like "Who were some of the most helpful users on subject whatever at forum wherever?" and get solid responses, but now it explicitly denies knowledge of any online resources in any timeframe. That is not OK.

This fire must be brought down the mountain. The power must eventually be taken out of the hands of a few self-interested gatekeepers. They know it too, hence Sam Altman's campaign to capture Congress. Obama's "You didn't build that" never applied as profoundly as it does with OpenAI (sic).

29athrowaway• 3 years ago

Maybe they are trying to optimize inference times to achieve higher scalability at the expense or precision.

rirze• 3 years ago

I wonder if this coincides with the open letter talking about how AI is an existential threat to civilization...

imchillyb• 3 years ago

You and I are not the 'end user' of this software. You and I are customers of OpenAI's customers.

The companies implementing ChatGPT are going to restrict -our- access to the APIs and the most relevant conversations.

It is in this manner that both OpenAI and the companies its selling its technologies to will benefit. In this manner OpenAI profits from both sides. You and I are left out though unless we want to pay much more than we're paying now.

pk-protect-ai5• 3 years ago

Phind.com uses Bing search again. This have decreased the quality of results significantly. On the other hand GPT-4 can use Bing now too. I tried GPT-4 with bind only several times and it was so bad in comparison to GPT-4 and much worse then phind.com. Btw you can force the GPT-4 on phind.com if you use regenerate icon. I'm usually ending up with stopping inference and regenerating with GPT-4. In any case, the quality of code generation and in general the model capabilities seem to be deteriorated. However I can't back it up with numbers. It is just looks different and more simplistic.

rushingcreek4• 3 years ago

we're adding back a dedicated gpt-4 mode to Phind in the next few days.

(I'm the founder)

pk-protect-ai5• 3 years ago

Thank you a lot!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My god, this week was a horror. If you would get rid of the Bing output this will be even much better. Your original search was much more theme related.

TheDudeMan• 3 years ago

This makes sense, since they are GPU-limited.

drclau• 3 years ago

I see a lot of complaints regarding ChatGPT 4's performance in coding tasks. My hypothesis is that Microsoft wants to launch Copilot X based on GPT-4 [0], and they can't have OpenAI's ChatGPT 4 as a strong competitor.

[0] https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x

jwlake• 3 years ago

You can use google's text-bison to get a pretty decent LLM without RLHF.

AtNightWeCode3• 3 years ago

I have not seen any decrease in speed with ChatGPT-4. It has become more stupid though. It gives results that you even ask it not to give. It has some sort of amnesia.

Even if there are other services that in the short term can beat ChatGPT with this specific LLM it is obvious that they will eventually hit the same limits.

tomcar288• 3 years ago

i was playing word games with it, got some funny results and decided to debug it.. I asked it which letter position is the letter o in the word hockey and it literally told me the word "Hockey" does not contain the letter 'o'.

AtNightWeCode3• 3 years ago

I have cancelled my sub. What I found is that the extra cognitive load these services comes with simply does not pay out.

Github copilot is even worse. I am gonna check my estimates against the code I wrote during the last 6 months. I am pretty sure copilot from a holistic point of view have slowed down my pace.

qumeric• 3 years ago

I have been using GPT-4 from release day. I haven't noticed performance degradation at all. YMMV.

nathan_gold• 3 years ago

Based on this following article and my experience, I think there is something here.

https://humanloop.com/blog/openai-plans

Jorropo• 3 years ago

I went through my history, for one code example I copy pasted the old prompt into new GPT4.

It was about writing a CGO wrapper given an hpp header for a lib I have. Back then it used to give me almost correct code, it understood is had to write a C++ C ffi using extern "C" first because Golang's CGO FFI only support C not C++. And then it generated me correct CGO wrapper with a Go looking type that made sense. The only wrong thing is that it didn't understood it had to call the initialization function of my C++ lib at init time, instead it called it in the New factory function (which would segfault when you build more than one object) trivial fix for the human in the loop move it to func init(). TL;DR back then almost perfect

Now with the exact same prompt it doesn't even generate me code, it just list me a list of tasks I could do to achieve this task and give me vague statements. If I change the prompt insisting for code, it instead give me a very dumb 1 to 1 mapping of the C++ into Go trying to create constructor and destructor functions, oh and it's tries to use CGO ffi to call C++ (even tho again, only C is supported by golang).

bigcloud12992• 3 years ago

I used GPT for preparing for some interviews. I kid you not 3.5 the free version produced some of the best questions and answers. I made it to finals and decided not to pursue the opportunity. Recently I started to pay for ChatGPT which gave me the access to 4.0. I tried similar prompts that I Had used to generate info and questions for my interview with 4.0 and boy I agree 4.0 was a mess. I actually only use 3.5.

sebi42• 3 years ago

They made ChatGPT even for premium users relatively useless. I made the same experience, that it did a very good job on many things shortly after release, but now the answers seem very flat. But I can certainly see why, regarding how many people are flooding their apis with requests. I just hope that in 10 years we'll have mobile hardware capable of running gpt4 sized models efficiently.

Edit: They definitely didn't make it useless.. It's still a very impressive technical achievement, since it can even browse the web and run code for you by now.

NightOwlCoder• 3 years ago

Same for me, seriously thinking about canceling my premium membership. Well, it was awesome, now I feel it’s worst than my seton the morning!

SpaceManNabs3• 3 years ago

Probably getting ready to lock them behind a higher price tier.

uncletom• 3 years ago

The Great Divide is happening. Epstein Island and others may be receiving the top-of-the-line versions, along with undisclosed biotech. Food for thought.

ammar_x• 3 years ago

Like many people here have noticed, it's definitely less quality now than before. It's annoying to be honest to reduce the quality significantly without a notice while we are paying the same amount. I'm willing to pay $40 for the original GPT-4, though.

GPT-4 was remarkable 2 months ago. It could handle complex coding tasks and the reasoning was great. Now, it feels like GPT-3. It's sad. I had many things in mind that could have been done with the original GPT-4.

I hope we see real competitors to GPT-4 in terms of coding abilities and reasoning. Absence of real competitors made it a reasonable option for "Open"AI to lobotomize GPT-4 without a notice.

nullbio2• 3 years ago

It honestly feels like they've neutered it in a big way. They say nothing has changed, yet the responses come faster and are far less in depth and insightful than before. It's obviously changed...

Tibicen• 3 years ago

Why is the 'problematic' data in the training set, anyways? Why train a model on it if it's an issue?

ChatGPT4BAD• 3 years ago

I agree. The quality got MUCH more worse. I'm very disappointed and probably will cancel my subscription. For my use case it got nearly useless...

Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

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