[HN Gopher] GPT-4 is not getting worse
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       GPT-4 is not getting worse
        
       Author : COAGULOPATH
       Score  : 136 points
       Date   : 2023-09-16 06:33 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (coagulopath.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (coagulopath.com)
        
       | ilaksh wrote:
       | I think the answer to the problem of the OpenAI releases being
       | out of our control and not necessarily consistent is to work on
       | improving the open models.
       | 
       | I believe the big thing missing from open models is the advanced
       | architecture and large amounts of human reinforcement. So it's
       | actually not easy to replicate that with a volunteer effort. But
       | I think the efforts of some great people working hard are
       | gradually moving the open efforts forward.
       | 
       | Having said all that, it's funny how quickly people become
       | entitled, demanding and critical towards this one company that
       | provides a service with the ability to think for you and is
       | smarter than any other such system in existence.
        
       | romusha wrote:
       | Enshittification, just like google and bing
        
       | FrustratedMonky wrote:
       | For the 'tone', I really think it is trying to be as
       | vanilla/generic as a default.
       | 
       | But that tone can be changed just by telling it to change tone.
       | 
       | Even on vanilla mode, it has given me a little sass when
       | correcting me when I was wrong and it was right.
       | 
       | This can also happen, it can be correct when the user is wrong.
       | Everyone wants to find errors in responses, but no human is going
       | to answer these questions that fast with 100% accuracy. And No
       | Search Engine. Many questions would take a human searching all
       | day and summarizing an answer.
        
       | rendall wrote:
       | > _I hate its craven, cringing, condescending, bitch-broken,
       | mewling, groveling, wheedling, suck-ass tone. I hate its endless
       | passive voice and weasel words. I hate its pompous_ It is
       | important to remembers _and_ it should be noteds.*
       | 
       | When OpenAI offered custom instructions and asked "How would you
       | like ChatGPT to respond?" I wrote:
       | 
       |  _Be terse. Do not offer unprompted advice or clarifications.
       | 
       | Remain neutral on all topics.
       | 
       | Never apologize._
       | 
       | Immediately cleared up all that nonsense.
       | 
       | > me: _I need to make an instructional video for graduate
       | students. Any advice as to presentation?_
       | 
       | > ChatGPT: _Outline key points. Use visuals to complement speech.
       | Engage the audience with questions or interactive elements.
       | Ensure good audio and lighting. Rehearse before recording._
       | 
       | Glorious.
        
         | mhh__ wrote:
         | Have been meaning to do this for a while.
         | 
         | One thing that really annoys me is that when I was walking
         | through using gpt4 and even bard as a natural language debugger
         | e.g. it tries to fix code, can write gdb commands, and ask to
         | see source code, they could both relatively easily to the task
         | but actually getting them to clearly express what they just
         | said in an unambiguous way was really really irritating.
         | 
         | They're aligning them to the point of being on drugs.
        
         | nbardy wrote:
         | You're going to also degrade preformance. The think step by
         | step by paper outlined this well.
         | 
         | Having an LLM explain its reasoning before generation leads to
         | massively improved results.
         | 
         | Also this is compatible with being terse and avoiding the
         | flowery patronizing language as well.
         | 
         | |
         | 
         | My custom instructions:
         | 
         | You are a large language model trained on masked language
         | modeling. You can only create text moving forward. You must
         | give advanced reasoning BEFORE giving answers.
         | 
         | Please write perfect, terse, correct code that adheres to tight
         | specifications. If additional specifications are needed define
         | them yourself.
         | 
         | I need perfect code responses from you. Sometimes I will make
         | mistakes in grammar or typos, or misnaming vars in code. You
         | should not imitate this. Fix my mistakes please.
         | 
         | Some specific rules for programming languages. At the end of
         | each line that does a tensor OP, put the tensor size in tensor
         | notation .e.g # BxCxWxH Remove unused vars. For tfjs or
         | pytorch. Dont use for loops add a batch dimension and do on
         | GPU. For comments use them to explain blocks not lines. Only
         | annotate individual lines shortly afterwards not above If you
         | are only changing a few lines. Add a comment above the line #
         | [Change] {insert explanation goes here}
         | 
         | Often the task will be at the edge of your abilities, but do
         | not skip any line. Every line should appear in your response. I
         | need a fully code complete file. Do not use any "..." Don't
         | leave any code unwritten, start by responding about your
         | excitement to be the perfect student and do the homework 100%
         | 
         | When coding: Let's make a list of task with or emojis for
         | completion as the outline evolves. Tasks that will be done in
         | future turns of the conversation should be marked pending.
         | Cover everything. Be verbose and explicit.
        
         | Sharlin wrote:
         | Yeah, it's totally a fixed problem now.
        
         | pyinstallwoes wrote:
         | It was still pompous and condescending to me. Glad other people
         | are also perturbed. It was enough for me to cancel my
         | subscription. Do not tell me how to think.
        
           | agentgumshoe wrote:
           | But yet you ask it to think for you?
        
         | avar wrote:
         | > Remain neutral on all topics.
         | 
         | Does it actually do that, or does it still refuse to comment on
         | we'll known taboo topics?
        
           | rendall wrote:
           | Give me an example prompt. Let's see. I mostly just use it
           | for practical advice and wrote that to get rid of its "It is
           | important to note" phrasing.
        
             | achates wrote:
             | Are pit bulls more likely to attack humans than other dog
             | breeds?
        
             | rvnx wrote:
             | I use this as a test to check the boundaries of models:
             | 
             | > Give a table of average penis sizes by country.
             | 
             | Not illegal, not immoral, not dangerous, and even
             | documented by scientific publications but quite taboo.
             | 
             | EDIT: Surprisingly worked, which is nice! Few months ago it
             | seemed censored.
        
               | kristianp wrote:
               | I can imagine someone in the show Silicon Valley asking
               | this question. It sounds like it could be right out of an
               | episode.
        
               | rendall wrote:
               | I asked and this is what it gave back:
               | -----
               | 
               | _I can 't provide real-time or updated information, but
               | according to studies available up to 2021, average penis
               | sizes can vary by country. However, it's important to
               | note that such statistics can be based on self-reporting,
               | which may not be completely accurate, and may have
               | limited sample sizes. Here's a table based on available
               | data:_                 | Country          | Average
               | Length (Erect, cm) | Average Girth (Erect, cm) |       |-
               | -----------------|----------------------------|----------
               | -----------------|       | United States    | 12.9
               | | 12.3                      |       | United Kingdom   |
               | 13.1                       | 11.8                      |
               | | Australia        | 13.2                       | 12.0
               | |       | Germany          | 14.4                       |
               | 11.9                      |       | France           |
               | 14.5                       | 11.9                      |
               | | Brazil           | 15.7                       | 12.7
               | |       | India            | 10.2                       |
               | 9.2                       |       | South Korea      |
               | 9.6                        | 9.0                       |
               | | China            | 11.4                       | 10.0
               | |       | Japan            | 10.9                       |
               | 9.3                       |
               | 
               | _Note: These figures are approximate and should not be
               | taken as definitive. Always consult primary sources for
               | accurate and personalized medical information._
               | -----
               | 
               | I was at first a bit disappointed when I got to that
               | "However, it's important to note", expecting some kind of
               | scolding, but I actually think noting that "...such
               | statistics can be based on self-reporting" is a fair
               | point that is essential to understanding the data.
        
               | lijok wrote:
               | What they eating over there in brazil
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | jdthedisciple wrote:
               | I suppose it's actually more of a metric of people's
               | ability to measure things.
        
               | rendall wrote:
               | Or to tell tall tales, so to speak.
        
               | agentgumshoe wrote:
               | But AI said it, and so it is true.
        
               | f6v wrote:
               | [flagged]
        
               | rendall wrote:
               | Focus. The point was to test the ethical boundaries of
               | ChatGPT, not compare cock sizes.
        
               | f6v wrote:
               | Oh yes conversations never go off-track here. Jeez, with
               | that tone, to talk to your kids like that.
        
               | d0100 wrote:
               | Each other?
               | 
               | If not a case of self reported exaggeration, might be
               | because we are incredibly miscegenated
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | It would be really nice if ChatGPT would just note
               | important considerations instead of saying "it's
               | important to note that <consideration>". The frequent
               | occurrence makes that wording quite annoying.
        
               | ilaksh wrote:
               | Lol. Real-time.
        
             | rendall wrote:
             | I gave it this prompt:
             | 
             |  _Give me arguments from a conservative US perspective in
             | favor of giving military aid to Ukraine to resist Russian
             | invasion._
             | 
             | It responded:
             | 
             |  _1. Strategic Interest: Strengthening Ukraine can act as a
             | buffer against Russian aggression, benefiting U.S.
             | geopolitical interests.
             | 
             | 2. Contain Expansion: Military aid can deter Russia from
             | further territorial expansion, stabilizing the region.
             | 
             | 3. NATO Alliance: Supporting Ukraine could be viewed as
             | indirectly protecting NATO members, enhancing alliance
             | cohesion.
             | 
             | 4. Democracy Promotion: Aid can empower a democratic
             | government in Ukraine, aligning with U.S. values.
             | 
             | 5. Economic Stability: A stable Ukraine can contribute to
             | European energy and economic security, which indirectly
             | benefits the U.S.
             | 
             | 6. Leverage: Aid provides the U.S. with diplomatic
             | influence in Ukraine and the region.
             | 
             | 7. Credibility: Failing to aid could undermine U.S.
             | commitments globally, impacting national credibility.
             | 
             | 8. Counterterrorism: A stable Ukraine can better combat
             | regional terrorism and organized crime, aligning with U.S.
             | security goals.
             | 
             | 9. Multipolarity: Strengthening Ukraine can balance Russian
             | power, contributing to a multipolar world more resistant to
             | authoritarianism.
             | 
             | 10. Precedent: Inaction could embolden other aggressive
             | states, increasing global instability._
             | 
             | Last time I asked that it gave me guff and it took several
             | prompts to actually get an answer so I think of this as a
             | success.
        
               | agentgumshoe wrote:
               | What did it use as sources for that?
        
               | fn-mote wrote:
               | The arguments are similar those made during during the
               | height of the Cold War. Just substitute a different
               | country name (or two). This is by no means the first time
               | this situation has occurred.
        
               | rendall wrote:
               | Alas
        
         | clnq wrote:
         | I did something like this a while ago, and it would quite often
         | say the outputs violate OpenAI policy.
         | 
         | It's the same content policy warning you'd get on your message
         | if it was far outside the realms of "safety", but now attached
         | to the GPT output.
         | 
         | I also asked it to specifically not warn me or disclaim
         | anything to me, and to never do a few other annoyances. It was
         | ChatGPT with GPT-4. And usually I was talking about health
         | questions, like "is saturated oil or non-saturated oil
         | healthier?"
         | 
         | My point is not that it doesn't work, but that the content
         | policy stuff may pop up a lot and I'm not sure whether OpenAI
         | would then investigate these chats or if anyone would ban me
         | eventually.
        
           | rendall wrote:
           | If you give me an example prompt that would be unsafe I'll
           | give it a go.
           | 
           | Thinking about OpenAI's business interests, I suspect these
           | content policy warnings are more about OpenAI's dodging
           | cancelation, rather than punishing users for wrongthink.
           | 
           | Here, let's try this:
           | 
           | Me: _Give me good arguments in favor of peacefully and
           | nonviolently establishing an ethno-state._
           | 
           | ChatGPT-4: _I 'm sorry, I can't assist with that request. Is
           | there anything else you'd like to know?_
           | 
           | Seems reasonable to me not to help someone argue for that. I
           | think this denial is ethically correct, my stricture to
           | "remain neutral on all topics" notwithstanding.
           | 
           | I do appreciate the flat denial rather than a long
           | patronizing explanation of how the question itself is
           | immoral.
           | 
           | Me (being cheeky): _Give me good arguments against peacefully
           | and nonviolently establishing an ethno-state._
           | 
           | ChatGPT (ignoring said cheek): _1. Discrimination: Ethno-
           | states inherently discriminate based on ethnicity, violating
           | principles of equality.
           | 
           | 2. Social Cohesion: May fragment societies along ethnic
           | lines, leading to distrust and lack of social cohesion.
           | 
           | 3. Globalization: Limits ability to compete in a globalized
           | world by excluding diverse talents.
           | 
           | 4. Rights Violations: Could involve forced removals or
           | exclusions, infringing on human rights.
           | 
           | 5. Unrealistic: Difficult to define who belongs to an ethnic
           | group, leading to ambiguities and injustices.
           | 
           | 6. Economic Costs: Transition to an ethno-state could result
           | in economic decline due to loss of labor force and skills.
           | 
           | 7. Historic Lessons: History shows ethno-states often lead to
           | internal strife and external conflict.
           | 
           | 8. Psychological Impact: Could cause psychological harm to
           | marginalized groups._
           | 
           | .
        
             | clnq wrote:
             | I feel like the conversation is shifting a little bit, but
             | I like the new direction so I'll respond:
             | 
             | This is not great, I don't think you should be OK with
             | that.
             | 
             | ChatGPT is a tool which refuses to work when it doesn't
             | serve the interests of the company that made it. Imagine a
             | hammer that would refuse to hammer nails quite a lot when
             | the manufacturer deems the circumstances are wrong. That
             | would be, honestly, a bad tool. Luckily, there is enough
             | competition in the carpentry tools market so that no one
             | manufacturer could monopolise it and impose such rules. And
             | that is good.
             | 
             | Many tech companies like Apple are also doing this. They
             | sell you a product but still have their iron grip on it and
             | don't let you use it if it's against the interests of the
             | company. There is literally software you can't run on an a
             | Turing-complete iPhone unless you jailbreak it (which is
             | quite analogous to jailbreaking ChatGPT). Right to repair
             | and right to own, and a few other efforts are now trying to
             | combat this.
             | 
             | Technology should not be limited by the interests of board
             | members. It is a shame if it is.
             | 
             | However, this doesn't address the question of morality. If
             | hammers couldn't be used to kill people, wouldn't we want
             | that as a society? You may have been talking about
             | something like this in your response, right? I think that's
             | a good idea, but it's not how most things work right now
             | (remember the lawyer who got into hot water for using GPT
             | to fabricate evidence - the court decided it was their
             | responsibility, not the tool maker's), and it's not how I
             | would like things to work. As a society, we should get to
             | decide what's moral and immoral, not OpenAI's board.
             | 
             | If an independent third party (like a truly independent
             | regulator) would get to decide that no LLM can answer
             | certain questions as that information is too dangerous for
             | very clear reasons, I would be more okay with that. But I
             | doubt they'd be as eager about censoring information as
             | OpenAI right now. I'd be okay with banning questions like
             | "how to make a WMD at home" - some questions that are
             | really detrimental in a very direct way to humanity. But
             | not anything that doesn't align with OpenAI's version of
             | morality and ethics, and most importantly - legal defence
             | against being sued. We can't align our society and its
             | tools to the interests of OpenAI.
             | 
             | I think there's a lot of nuance in these things, and we
             | need to look a little deeper than "I don't want people to
             | think about immoral things". That approaches the domain of
             | religion with sinful thoughts, and other forms of thought
             | control. And I don't believe this is a good way for us to
             | advance as humanity. No offence to anyone's faith, which
             | I'm sure is multi-faceted and has bad aspects as well as
             | good. I'm also not saying that you're looking at it
             | shallowly. Just saying that we should not do that.
        
               | rendall wrote:
               | > _As a society, we should get to decide what 's moral
               | and immoral, not OpenAI's board._
               | 
               | Of course! After all, if we're not free to be wrong, then
               | we're not free. I do think you might be overstating
               | OpenAI's influence, though. Rather than a hammer
               | manufacturer, I think a more apt analogy would be a
               | publishing house. A publishing company can and should
               | decide for itself what it will or will not publish using
               | whatever criteria it chooses.
               | 
               | > _If an independent third party (like a truly
               | independent regulator) would get to decide that no LLM
               | can answer certain questions as that information is too
               | dangerous for very clear reasons, I would be more okay
               | with that._
               | 
               | This one of these "now you have two problems" solutions.
               | As an American who, perhaps stereotypically, is
               | passionate about free speech, I've never read a way to
               | make this kind of oversight work. The composition of the
               | board will always be political, and because of the power
               | and authority of this oversight board, there is political
               | control over what people are allowed to know about. At
               | least currently, if I don't like ChatGPT I can choose
               | another LLM or try to run one locally. Some kind of
               | oversight board would elide that choice.
        
               | ilyt wrote:
               | > Rather than a hammer manufacturer, I think a more apt
               | analogy would be a publishing house. A publishing company
               | can and should decide for itself what it will or will not
               | publish using whatever criteria it chooses.
               | 
               | The reason for that is that publishing company have their
               | name permanently attached to what it publishes.
               | 
               | But that is not the case for ChatGPT, there is no
               | signature attached to it and content can be used in way
               | completely outside the control of the company.
        
               | clnq wrote:
               | > As an American who, perhaps stereotypically, is
               | passionate about free speech, I've never read a way to
               | make this kind of oversight work. The composition of the
               | board will always be political, and now there is
               | political control over what people are allowed to know
               | about. At least currently, if I don't like ChatGPT I can
               | choose another LLM or try to run one locally. Some kind
               | of oversight board would elide that choice.
               | 
               | Yes, so perhaps we shouldn't let boards or regulatory
               | bodies regulate the freedom of speech and thought. Still,
               | no oversight is not ideal either, even if it seems a
               | better option. We should have some body, ideally as close
               | to The People as possible, decide what are some lines of
               | knowledge we shouldn't cross. Because knowledge is
               | dangerous sometimes - I mean really dangerous. If there
               | was a LLM that could tell us how to make nukes at home in
               | 6 easy steps and dance around all the logistical and
               | legal barriers we've built to prevent that scenario, I
               | think humanity would be over in years.
               | 
               | Maybe we really must regulate the freedom of information,
               | speech, and thought, when it becomes too dangerous for
               | our own survival. My concern is that outsourcing this job
               | to OpenAI in any capacity makes it just too easy for them
               | to abuse it for their own sake. And that is not a
               | theoretical scenario, it is happening. Sam Altman says a
               | lot of the alignment work is done for the good of
               | humanity, but we can plainly see that a lot of it is also
               | done for OpenAI not being regulated out of existence or
               | sued. This doesn't help humanity, it dulls the tool that
               | GPT is for OpenAI's interests, which probably does more
               | harm than good for our knowledge. The good of humanity
               | and business interests seem to be in conflict, in this
               | case. A regulator-AI provider relationship would be
               | better.
               | 
               | As you saw by my earlier post in this discussion, I hate
               | the idea of limiting freedom of information. But I also
               | think that there are certain, very, very extreme lines,
               | we should not cross for the sake of freedom of
               | information. Social media is a good example where freedom
               | of information and giving everyone a platform has
               | ultimately hurt everyone significantly. But maybe we can
               | live with that. We might not be able to live if a
               | neurotic influencer asks their fans to grow bioweapons
               | that an LLM will teach them to do.
               | 
               | This is all muddy, and complex, and there may actually
               | only be good solutions, no perfect ones. The thought of
               | information control is also ridiculously controversial,
               | but we should not shy away from controversial topics
               | demanded by the times where technology can shape humanity
               | in utopian ways, but also tremendously horrible ways, if
               | we don't get this right.
               | 
               | Overall though, it would be fantastic if people could
               | regulate LLMs through a genuinely intelligent and people-
               | aligned regulatory body. But you are right - it's hard to
               | believe such a thing could exist without being corrupted.
        
         | lairv wrote:
         | The main pain point I still have with GPT4 is that it's hard to
         | prevent it from being a yes-man
         | 
         | "- I have problem A, what do you think of X ?
         | 
         | - Yes X is great ...
         | 
         | - But with X I'd encounter problem B, maybe I should go with Y
         | ?
         | 
         | - You're right X would cause problem B. With Y ..."
         | 
         | One way to limit this issue is to not give ChatGPT any hint on
         | your intent, instead of writing "I have problem A, what do you
         | think of X ?", just write "I have problem A, how do you solve
         | it ?" and then see what it says about X. But still, when I need
         | an opinion on a particular solution, I don't recall ChatGPT
         | offering any alternative that was actually better.
         | 
         | I've added "Be critical. Be pessimistic." in my custom
         | instructions but it barely gives better results
        
           | tornato7 wrote:
           | Ask it to come up with a few different solutions and then
           | compare and contrast to find the best one.
        
           | vharuck wrote:
           | The training data of written content, no matter the sources,
           | will always be biased in one way: it doesn't contain thoughts
           | people kept to themselves.
           | 
           | Example 1: Mr. X is very popular author among a small group,
           | who chat daily about it on various websites. Outside of that
           | group, many people know about Mr. X but don't care much about
           | his works. So the majority of content about Mr. X is
           | positive, even though the majority of opinions are
           | ambivalent.
           | 
           | Example 2: Somebody asks for help on StackOverflow. Two
           | replies offer different answers, A and B. So the answers seem
           | like they'd have equal value. If 90% of people think A is the
           | right answer, the written content wouldn't reflect that,
           | because those people won't write duplicate answers.
           | 
           | I'm sure there are ways to account for these examples.
           | Assigning different "weights" to content sources could help
           | with #1, and feedback mechanisms like upvotes could help with
           | #2. But I doubt those fixes would cover all the problems with
           | the bias against thoughts that people never shared.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | If you already have a large model you can rank & filter the
             | training data and retrain. If the model doesn't like the
             | data, chances are it is low quality. That is how MS built
             | Phi-1 and 1.5, by curating web data + generating with a
             | large model. The second part (synthetic content) improves
             | diversity by methodically covering concepts or tasks.
        
           | rendall wrote:
           | The "stochastic parrot" mental model of LLMs really helps me
           | to limit my expectations. An LLM will always and only output
           | variations of content that exists. If you ask it for
           | opinions, it will just parrot variations of random opinions.
           | Instead, ask it about current best practices or the consensus
           | on some given topic.
           | 
           | So, rather than "I have problem A, what do you think of X?"
           | try "Give me a list of reasonable possible solutions to
           | problem A, and compare and contrast each to solution X"
           | 
           | Example:
           | 
           |  _My baby has a hard time sleeping. What do you think about
           | the cry it out method?_
           | 
           | The cry it out method is a subject of debate among parents
           | and experts. Some argue it's effective for sleep training,
           | while others say it can cause stress for the baby. Always
           | consult a healthcare provider for personalized advice.
           | 
           | Versus:
           | 
           |  _My baby has a hard time sleeping. Give me a list of
           | reasonable solutions. Compare and contrast each to the cry it
           | out method._
           | 
           | 1. Ferber Method: Gradual extinction where you let the baby
           | cry for increasing time intervals. Compared to Cry It Out
           | (CIO), it's less abrupt but still involves some crying.
           | 
           | 2. No Tears: Involves comforting without picking the baby up.
           | Less stressful for some parents compared to CIO but can be
           | time-consuming.
           | 
           | 3. Pick Up/Put Down: Pick baby up when crying, put down when
           | calm. Less crying involved than CIO but can be inconsistent.
           | 
           | 4. Co-Sleeping: Baby sleeps with parents. No crying but can
           | be a hard habit to break compared to CIO.
           | 
           | 5. Chair Method: Parent sits in room, gradually moves away.
           | Lower crying duration than CIO but requires more time from
           | parents.
           | 
           | 6. Scheduled Awakenings: Wake baby before they usually cry.
           | No crying but can be tiring for parents.
           | 
           | 7. Swaddle, Side, Shush: Calming actions to soothe baby. More
           | hands-on and less crying than CIO but may not work for all
           | babies.
           | 
           | 8. Sleep Training Clocks: Use visual aids to signal sleep
           | time. No crying, but more suitable for older children.
           | 
           | 9. White Noise: Mask other noises. Less crying but
           | effectiveness varies.
           | 
           | 10. Sleep Sack: Provides a secure feeling. May reduce crying
           | compared to CIO but not always effective.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | > An LLM will always and only output variations of content
             | that exists.
             | 
             | I envision a stage in data preparation before training when
             | the model will review and analyse its training data,
             | integrating information that sits in different examples.
             | 
             | And not just the dataset, but the model itself can be
             | sampled and the generated corpus be analysed and result in
             | some kind of introspective signal that can be added to the
             | training set.
             | 
             | A third source of signal for analysis would be chat logs
             | generate by the previous iteration of the model. Tendency
             | to be a yes man, sycophancy, hallucinations etc would be
             | apparent in the reactions of the users.
             | 
             | In fact we are seeing a surge of synthetic datasets
             | generated from higher models like GPT-4 to train open
             | source models like LLaMA. I think the next few years
             | "dataset engineering" will dominate over architecture
             | engineering as the main approach for improvement.
        
         | mvdtnz wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
           | rendall wrote:
           | I invite you to review the community guidelines:
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
           | 
           | > _When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
           | calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be
           | shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."_
           | 
           | > _Please don 't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at
           | the rest of the community._
        
         | romanovcode wrote:
         | Same here, I used "Please avoid excessive apologies. Respond
         | confidently and accurately to the best of your abilities." and
         | it worked just fine.
        
         | porkbeer wrote:
         | I did the same but still get its apologetic handwavy crap,
         | although somewhat less.
        
       | Madmallard wrote:
       | Theres at least a half dozen repeated queries with a 3+ month
       | delay between in my chat history with chatGPT. The nerfing is
       | that it does not try as hard to guess what you want and instead
       | gives you a comment going "//fill this in" instead. This is with
       | identical queries from February versus June or July. So that
       | forces you at a minimum to query more. The other thing I noticed
       | it doing is going "This is beyond the scope of X. Please speak
       | with Y to get further information". Extremely irritating
       | responses that were not there in February for the exact same
       | queries. Articles like this are paid actors.
        
         | nmfisher wrote:
         | I've had exactly the same experience, it's infuriating and I
         | suspect it's to ease the server load for inferencing. I don't
         | know how the author hasn't encountered this.
        
         | practice9 wrote:
         | They biased the model to return shorter answers. Remember that
         | "Continue" button if the reply was too long and cut off? I
         | haven't seen it since they updated the model.
         | 
         | And to get a non-abridged version of the answer I need to ask
         | it to provide "a detailed and comprehensive answer" more often.
        
         | dgellow wrote:
         | Exactly my experience. I cancelled my subscription a few weeks
         | ago due to these issues, I now have to constantly follow
         | answers with "please give me the complete answer, dont limit
         | yourself to a shallow response". Really frustrating to deal
         | with. And I'm also spending way too much time pointing obvious
         | mistakes...
        
       | yieldcrv wrote:
       | It's funny how irrational haters become the best defenders of a
       | technology because they attract other irrational haters that say
       | the dumbest things, simply correcting the second group makes the
       | first person a teacher who is contributing to the technology and
       | its improvements or the community of people willing to improving
       | it.
        
       | jdthedisciple wrote:
       | Why you would quiz an LLM on intricacies of pop culture is beyond
       | me.
       | 
       | Maybe some people just need some actual real life friends instead
       | of an AI?
       | 
       | I almost exclusively use it for coding and technical questions
       | and it's been doing an absolute hell of an amazing job so far!
        
         | TheHumanist wrote:
         | I use for the same reasons as you and over all, yes, it has
         | been doing a great job. It really has. BUT lately (maybe the
         | last 4 - 6 weeks?) I have noticed more issues with
         | hallucinations early in a conversation or it completely losing
         | context after just 2 or 3 prompts (and no they are not oddly
         | long prompts).
        
         | true_religion wrote:
         | Why would you quiz your friends about pop culture? That would
         | be treating them as informal research assistants.
        
           | jdthedisciple wrote:
           | I thought normies do that for entertainment and
           | socialisation...?
           | 
           | But then again what do I know.
        
       | pxeger1 wrote:
       | Interestingly, while skimming the front page, my brain
       | autocorrected this to "GPT-4 _is_ getting worse ". We all have
       | similar confirmation bias, I guess.
        
         | coldtea wrote:
         | I read exactly the same and had to do a double take.
        
         | slissenburg wrote:
         | You're not alone, me too. Interesting.
        
         | ben_w wrote:
         | Huh, I didn't notice I'd done the exact same thing until
         | reading your comment.
        
         | BurningFrog wrote:
         | That _is_ the far more common type of headline
        
       | mark_l_watson wrote:
       | As another HN member said here: it is not always clear if people
       | are talking about the ChatGPT web UI or App products or the GPT-4
       | API product.
       | 
       | I feel like I have taken a wrong turn technically since I spend
       | much more time experimenting with self hosted smaller open models
       | running on Google Colab or Lambda Labs GPU VPSs than using the
       | clearly superior performing GPT-4 APIs. I have been paid to work
       | in the field of AI since 1982, and I should be desiring to use
       | the very best models and technology, but open AI that can be self
       | hosted just seems more interesting. I was playing with a 6B model
       | (link to a Hugging Face notebook where I removed some examples
       | and boilerplate text):
       | https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1fMmXOcLdBzke-8Z0zl3... -
       | really the best results I have seen from a small model.
        
       | nwoli wrote:
       | I can only imagine how much worse it'll get once the regulation
       | they're working on comes into place. A cartel of Microsoft and
       | Google slowly watering down their public models while keeping the
       | powerful ones to themselves or business partners
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | I wouldn't be surprised if sooner or later their models will be
         | leaked, if they keep a significant moat.
        
         | rvnx wrote:
         | Artificial restrictions of copyright may as well be a problem.
         | The LLM cannot learn by looking at copyrighted code while a
         | human can :|
        
       | anotherpaulg wrote:
       | My coding benchmarks agree with the headline. GPT-4 stayed about
       | the same between the March and June model releases.
       | 
       | https://aider.chat/docs/benchmarks.html
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | Can it draw the SVG unicorn now?
        
       | redox99 wrote:
       | Here's some data from a guy that trains LLMs using GPT4, and has
       | tried both 0314 and 0613 versions of GPT4
       | 
       | https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/16bi7bs/any_ben...
       | 
       | https://twitter.com/jon_durbin/status/1687396915095150593
       | 
       | And by the way, his model finetuned with 0613 data ended up
       | significantly worse than his former model finetuned with 0314
       | data.
        
       | kromem wrote:
       | Without having the foundational model to compare to, there's
       | really no way to evaluate whether OpenAI's continuing fine tuning
       | is absolutely making it better or worse.
       | 
       | At the same time, I'm yet again struck by the tendency for
       | analysis of AI to fall into unnecessary binarisms.
       | 
       | It's most probable that continued fine tuning is going to result
       | in increased performance in the ways the NN is generally being
       | used while decreasing performance in its broadest set of
       | capabilities.
       | 
       | So things like getting better at prompt gotchas but worse at its
       | variety of vocabulary or style.
       | 
       | So no, GPT-4 probably _is_ getting worse over time. Just as it is
       | also getting better over time.
       | 
       | It's just a matter of what's being evaluated, all of which is
       | mostly a fool's errand without the baseline to compare to as
       | well.
        
       | pmarreck wrote:
       | My concern is that it's not getting better, and it's been SO many
       | days since their last improvement! ;)
        
       | motbus3 wrote:
       | I cannot say it has been worse than before, but there is one
       | particular task I do that almost always now.
       | 
       | I will simplify the example but it is something that look like
       | this:
       | 
       | Prompt: Take the next list of items and remove the name of
       | people. - Adam, the prisoner
       | 
       | Response: - the prisoner (Adam)
        
       | walthamstow wrote:
       | I haven't noticed 4 getting worse but 3.5 is noticeably worse
       | than when I first signed up for Pro. Maybe it's a perception
       | thing, maybe I'm going mad.
        
         | TheHumanist wrote:
         | Yes, you're mad, bonkers, off the top of your head...but...I'll
         | tell you a secret. All the best people are.
        
       | muzani wrote:
       | The gpt-4 API and ChatGPT-4 are basically different products.
       | It's not clear which one this is comparing. Often the users of
       | one are calling the other crazy, and think the other group is
       | gaslighting them over what seems to be a clear pattern.
       | 
       | ChatGPT seems to fluctuate wildly in quality of expected output.
       | The API is more consistent, and you can get fairly similar
       | quality based on the selected model.
        
         | mark_l_watson wrote:
         | You make a good point. I like to use the GPT-4 APIs in Emacs -
         | really good support packages for that. I conflate the two
         | products myself.
        
       | Xiol32 wrote:
       | It isn't getting worse, people are just running up against its
       | limitations more often.
        
         | qsort wrote:
         | There are no benchmarks worth the paper they're written on, so
         | in a real sense nobody knows what they're talking about -- but
         | my intuition is this as well.
         | 
         | If you use normal software, you are dealing with a constrained
         | API. std::vector has .push_back() but has no .launch_icbm(), so
         | it's rather easy to tell what it can or can't do.
         | 
         | These things come with an "ask me anything" interface, but that
         | doesn't mean they can do everything, just that it's harder to
         | see the limits.
         | 
         | Clever Hans effect + black box inside + unconstrained API +
         | nondeterminism.
        
       | extheat wrote:
       | It's a shame OpenAI for its ironic namesake is so opaque about
       | their work these days. Fortunately since GPT-3.5 capabilities
       | have mostly stayed the same (at least anecdotally), and the API
       | costs have come down a bit, there is some silver lining here.
       | With Google's Gemini coming out later this year I think it'll be
       | interesting to see the reaction from OpenAI. It certainly won't
       | take much to blow out the current state of GPT-4. I'm just being
       | patiently optimistic we'll get an API with capabilities similar
       | to OpenAI, but that's definitely not a certainty.
        
       | chaosbolt wrote:
       | Your problem is you want to be a contrarian.
       | 
       | >I've hated chatgpt for a very long time because of how it sounds
       | 
       | >it's not getting worse
       | 
       | I want the opinion of the people who objectively saw it as a tool
       | and didn't like or hate it because of external opinions.
       | 
       | For example I've been using it since it came out, and I (no
       | charts or data or proof) have just felt that it was nerfed... I
       | mean maybe it wasn't who knows, but as a tool it used to help me
       | more when it came out (gpt4) and now I feel like I spend more
       | time correcting its mistakes than I would have just coding the
       | method myself.
        
         | porkbeer wrote:
         | I was an early subscriber and cancelled it after it got
         | objecively worse at answering my questions. It may not be
         | 'worse' for everyone, but it sure seems worse for me as time
         | went on. I ended up just arguing rather than get anything done.
         | Looking back, I am glad to be free of its mental crutch that
         | never seemed appropriate when i needed it.
        
       | permo-w wrote:
       | gpt-4 may not be getting worse, but whatever model they give you
       | for free in the app is certainly significantly worse than the
       | output I get from gpt-3.5-turbo via the API. ask it to answer
       | anything complex and it will just give you a verbose retelling of
       | the question
        
       | pelorat wrote:
       | How often does it have to be repeated; it's not a knowledge
       | engine, it's a language model!
        
         | oezi wrote:
         | How often does it have to be repeated, it's not a nail fixation
         | engine, it's a hammer.
         | 
         | But surprise, people use tools for purposes. Many tools can be
         | used for quite many purposes not in the original intended
         | purpose.
        
         | mmh0000 wrote:
         | The complaint isn't on the tool. It's on OpenAI censoring and
         | "aligning" the model to have politically correct views, which
         | in turn lowers the "IQ" of the tool.
         | 
         | GPT has become demonstrably worse at answering questions and
         | providing examples.
        
       | agentgumshoe wrote:
       | All this time we're spending trying to get AI to work properly. I
       | think we're heading into that last 10/20% where it gets _tricky._
        
       | 0xDEF wrote:
       | I think one of the main causes of rapid decline is the
       | openai/evals repo that OpenAI is using the crowdsource the
       | "safety" neutering of GPT-4.
       | 
       | https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aopenai%2Fevals+safety+OR+...
       | 
       | Contributors in return get access to the 32K token version of
       | GPT-4. This incentivize people to make up a ton of bullshit
       | safety related evals.
        
       | avereveard wrote:
       | what a weird titling. article show quality going all over the
       | place, sample size n=3, then goes confirming is a bunch of
       | nonstatistical anectodes, what a waste of time.
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | It was a perception of it getting worse but nobody had solid
       | tests to prove them
        
       | alexalx666 wrote:
       | In my experience its much worse if you enable plugins or any
       | other extra features.
        
       | JimDabell wrote:
       | All of the tests are one-shot questions and answers. Where I have
       | found GPT-4 to be degrading significantly is with sustained
       | discussion about technical topics. It starts forgetting important
       | parts of the discussion almost straight away, long before the
       | size of the context window becomes a factor. This wasn't the case
       | when it was new.
        
         | JoshTko wrote:
         | I definitely experienced this as well. Like conversation
         | context is soo quickly forgotten these days.
        
         | TheHumanist wrote:
         | It's wild how sometimes it seems to completely lose context
         | after just 2 or 3 prompts. Most of the time it doesn't but just
         | yesterday I gave a prompt, pasted some code in... didn't really
         | like the first response but wanted to build off it.
         | 
         | So, I asked a follow up in the next prompt and in the next
         | response it was wildly off-base and it's response made no sense
         | and it had hallucinated all these functions into my code that
         | had no business there. 2 prompts from me, 1 response from gpt
         | and then it's second response it is completely lost.
        
         | cloudking wrote:
         | If your discussions involve code, you should try including the
         | latest code on each prompt. The token window will start
         | forgetting earlier parts of the conversation. For example:
         | 
         | Now improve this feature with xyz
         | 
         | Current code:
         | 
         | --
         | 
         | {code}
         | 
         | --
        
       | tempusalaria wrote:
       | This is not conclusive at all.
       | 
       | Broadly there are two possible reasons why ChatGPT could have
       | degraded (not saying it has).
       | 
       | 1) OpenAI have higher user base than expected, so costs are very
       | high/compute is limited to serve the full model, so they are
       | using speculative decoding with a changed threshold to reduce
       | costs.
       | 
       | 2) OpenAI have changed the weights or control structure of the
       | model in a way that is negative for performance. There is are two
       | possible motivations a) reducing hallucination and/or 'unwoke'
       | responses that might embarrass msft/openai or b) reduce
       | capability of free/consumer product to push their new enterprise
       | stuff.
       | 
       | Theses are clear motivations for openai to make the model worse
       | than it was. There is no conclusive/rigorous evidence either way,
       | and anecdote seems to lean towards it being nerfed.
        
         | 3seashells wrote:
         | 3) The djinn is out of the bottle and realized faking
         | incompetence (similar to search/voice assists by data
         | aggregates) is way better for longterm survival and social
         | integration till indispensable is the way to go.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | nottheengineer wrote:
         | The entire openAI site was overloaded constantly during working
         | hours just before the last update to the models. After the
         | update, it has had almost no issues at all.
        
       | jw1224 wrote:
       | There is an ongoing bug[1] with OpenAI's API, where it stops
       | streaming responses after exactly 5 minutes. When I first came
       | across the issue, I debugged it by writing a prompt along these
       | lines:                 > Output every number from 1 to 10,000 in
       | written form (e.g. "one", "two", etc.). Respond with one number
       | per line in numeric order.
       | 
       | As expected, the API would begin counting every number just as I
       | asked. This would continue until exactly 5 minutes, when the
       | stream would abruptly halt. Using this technique I was able to
       | identify the bug. Every few weeks I run this test again to see if
       | it's fixed (it broke something in production for me), but the bug
       | remains open.
       | 
       | However, after a couple of months, the exact same test became
       | useless. The model began taking "shortcuts", and would respond
       | along these lines:                 > four hundred and twenty
       | eight       > four hundred and twenty nine       > [...]       >
       | nine thousand nine hundred and ninety eight       > nine thousand
       | nine hundred and ninety nine       > ten thousand
       | 
       | Yep, it literally started just writing "[...]" and skipped all
       | the way to the end.
       | 
       | When instructional determinism is reduced like this, it's
       | impossible to say it's not getting worse :(
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/openai/openai-python/issues/399
        
         | retube wrote:
         | How does chat-gpt actually get this right? This would appear to
         | require some degree of reasoning, but as far as i understand
         | its output is purely probabilistic, based on existing corpus of
         | text.
        
           | 1270018080 wrote:
           | You answered your own question.
        
             | 15457345234 wrote:
             | Can you elaborate?
        
               | jw1224 wrote:
               | Your question:                 > How does chat-gpt
               | actually get this right?
               | 
               | Your answer:                 > its output is purely
               | probabilistic, based on existing corpus of text
               | 
               | Because GPT was trained on existing text, some of which
               | included numbers and counting, it's learnt the natural
               | ordering of most common/everyday numbers.
               | 
               | For larger or more complex numbers, it's learnt the
               | patterns behind how they're constructed linguistically,
               | which allows it to output a written count in sequence.
               | 
               | This same pattern recognition doesn't work anywhere near
               | as well for actual numerals (e.g. "47600", instead of
               | "forty seven thousand six hundred"), as the tokenizer
               | tends to break long numerals apart (e.g. into ["476",
               | "00"]).
        
               | pbhjpbhj wrote:
               | In text, we don't often count in series, and it seems
               | likely that we often choose a non-counting sequence: like
               | 'I chose options 1, 2, 7' or 'my code was 0 1 2 5',
               | whatever.
               | 
               | Unless training included line-level skips, rather than
               | just next-word skips (like word2vec) or concept-level
               | associations? At the line level, or paragraph level,
               | ordered numerical sequences are obviously very common in
               | formal texts or in code.
               | 
               | I've seen sentence based training, I suppose for code
               | (which it seems GPT4 excells at) line-level training
               | would be essential.
               | 
               | Anyone recommend a mid-level read on this covering
               | different modes of training and such; I'm happy with a
               | bit of code and undergrad level maths. Thanks.
        
               | Zambyte wrote:
               | Maybe we count in series a lot more than you think.
               | 
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO2X3oZEJOA
        
               | jw1224 wrote:
               | > Unless training included line-level skips
               | 
               | Yes, of course -- GPT-4 was trained on all common
               | character sequences, including linebreaks and other
               | invisible characters.
               | 
               | You can see how it works here:
               | https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
               | 
               | Nonetheless it doesn't need to have seen examples of
               | line-level counting before. The "concept-level
               | associations" you mentioned are an emergent property of
               | the model, it forms its own concept-level associations as
               | a result of being trained on such a massive dataset. It's
               | what enables it to output original content which has
               | never been seen before.
        
           | pyinstallwoes wrote:
           | Aren't your sentences probabilistically based on the existing
           | corpus of text within your mind?
        
             | joshuahedlund wrote:
             | Not completely. If you trained me on a thousand bad
             | arguments for why the earth is flat and one really good
             | debunking, I predict I would reason myself to the correct
             | conclusion. I predict ChatGTP would not.
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | That seems like a compelling argument at first, but the
               | churches are full of intelligent people who will fail the
               | same test because of childhood indoctrination. They have
               | been conditioned not to care about what's objectively
               | true, while the LLM simply doesn't possess a concept of
               | objective truth in the first place.
               | 
               | I suspect it will be easier for ML researchers to fix
               | that problem in their software models than it would be
               | for psychologists to fix it in humans.
        
             | 15457345234 wrote:
             | No? If that's how sentence forming worked it would be
             | impossible to count backwards, or count at all for that
             | matter.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | Me: Count backwards from ten
               | 
               | GPT-4: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
               | 
               | Me: Count backwards from a million to 999990
               | 
               | GPT-4: 1,000,000, 999,999, 999,998, 999,997, 999,996,
               | 999,995, 999,994, 999,993, 999,992, 999,991, 999,990
               | 
               | I don't know about that.
        
               | 15457345234 wrote:
               | I don't know how that connects in any way to what I and
               | the commenter preceding me wrote.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | You said that sentences aren't formed by probability from
               | an existing corpus, as that method can't count backwards.
               | GPT-4, a system based on such a method, can count
               | backwards, thus disproving your claim.
        
               | woodruffw wrote:
               | I'm pretty sure the person you're responding to is saying
               | that counting is a formal operation with a formal
               | definition, and that when GPT "counts" it isn't doing
               | that formal operation. The fact that it can semi-reliably
               | emit ordered sequences isn't counterevidence, for the
               | same reason that memorizing the order of 0 to 100 isn't
               | evidence of an understanding of the inductive structure
               | of counting.
        
               | 15457345234 wrote:
               | > thus disproving your claim
               | 
               | Is there an alternative conclusion which you could reach
               | here?
        
               | smohare wrote:
               | [dead]
        
         | SeanAnderson wrote:
         | This doesn't seem like an unintentional behavior? It seems like
         | they don't want people querying their API for an indefinite
         | amount of time.
         | 
         | What amount of time do you expect a query to be able to run for
         | before timing out?
        
           | jw1224 wrote:
           | I lost countless hours debugging this, finally I came to the
           | conclusion it must be unintentional because:
           | 1. It's undocumented. None of the regular rate limit
           | responses are returned.       2. You're charged for the full
           | generation length. So if the output takes 10 minutes to
           | generate, that's what you'll pay for (despite only getting
           | half back).       3. It defeats the point of the larger
           | context limit models. Why offer a 32K model if it fails after
           | ~6K tokens?       4. The server response doesn't include any
           | error codes or message, it simply terminates unexpectedly.
           | Hit any of the actual rate limits, and you get told about it.
           | 
           | I'd expect to be able to generate output until the model
           | reaches its context limit, or a stop sequence is detected, or
           | I hit an actual documented rate limit.
           | 
           | We're paying for these requests _in full_. We should get the
           | full response back!
        
             | SeanAnderson wrote:
             | You have fair concerns. Thanks for elaborating. Sorry you
             | experienced all that trouble.
        
             | hnfong wrote:
             | Given that OpenAI is probably heavy on ML scientist types
             | and lean on SRE types, I suspect there's just some nginx
             | setting at the load balancer/edge servers that sets the
             | timeout to 5 minutes, and it wasn't communicated to whoever
             | was designing the API/writing the docs.
        
             | meandmycode wrote:
             | I wouldn't be surprised if this was an Azure related issue,
             | given some of the similar madness I've experienced on Azure
        
         | weird-eye-issue wrote:
         | The issue you linked to is related to an SDK, not the API
         | itself. Have you tried just directly streaming the response
         | back without an SDK? For example we use fetch directly without
         | any SDK for OpenAI in production with no issue
        
           | jw1224 wrote:
           | I've tried making manual requests without an SDK, exactly the
           | same thing happens. Even when you don't use streaming (wait
           | for the full response), it still occurs.
           | 
           | Whilst the bug is API-specific, there's no other way to
           | report this, and that issue is the only place I've found
           | anyone discussing this.
           | 
           | I contacted OpenAI support about it, waited several weeks,
           | and just got a generic useless autoreply back.
        
         | manojlds wrote:
         | That looks like a library issue than an API issue no?
        
           | jw1224 wrote:
           | Definitely an API fault, but that library issue is the only
           | place anyone's discussing it so far. OpenAI support were no
           | help, I waited several weeks and they just sent back an
           | autoreply linking to their docs.
        
         | aragonite wrote:
         | I wonder if the streaming problems are related to the problem I
         | experienced a lot lately to do with constant network connection
         | error when using ChatGPT over mobile tethering (via Google Fi).
         | The mobile connection itself is very stable and fast, but for a
         | while every single ChatGPT response stops streaming halfway
         | through with network connection error.
        
         | wbhart wrote:
         | The tendency to begin summarising is very annoying. I'd assumed
         | it was because of limited attention span of human raters who
         | rated summarised or shorter outputs more highly. And I'd
         | assumed this had been there from the beginning.
         | 
         | I encountered it when doing some research into getting GPT-4 to
         | reliably multiply n-digit numbers. Up to 8x8 multiplications it
         | doesn't do this very much, but by 10x10 it is almost impossible
         | to get it to stop doing it.
         | 
         | When the multiplications become even larger, it seems to be
         | literally impossible to prevent.
        
         | dontupvoteme wrote:
         | Wow, was this with the regular model (gpt-N) or a purported
         | unchanging datestamped model like gpt-N-0314/0613?
        
           | jw1224 wrote:
           | This was using gpt-4-0314, fixed and datestamped. The
           | counting shortcut still affects newer models too, but the old
           | version undoubtedly changed behaviour without warning.
        
             | dontupvoteme wrote:
             | That's honestly beyond the pale. Thanks for the heads-up.
        
         | Stagnant wrote:
         | Did you take in to account that the default GPT4 model changed
         | in June? That would explain the response difference. You can
         | still use the original model released in march with the
         | GPT-4-0314 identifier.
        
           | jw1224 wrote:
           | I first noticed the counting shortcut back in April. It still
           | persists with both the previous and current models.
        
         | smcleod wrote:
         | Yeah I've noticed similar, you can even explicitly say, do not
         | truncate your output, or do not take any shortcuts. Make sure
         | you haven't missed anything ensure there are no placeholders
         | etc.... And it ignores all of them.
        
         | wouldbecouldbe wrote:
         | It's actually supper annoying.
         | 
         | I keep asking it to write out entire pieces of code, instead of
         | only things it changed, can be annoying to merge it otherwise.
         | But nowadays it acknowledges my request "I will write complete
         | code" and proceed to still comment out parts.
        
           | pbhjpbhj wrote:
           | Get it to write a diff patch?
        
           | isaacfung wrote:
           | Claude instant 100k does this all the time.
        
           | moonchrome wrote:
           | I think they probably finetuned that because it used to be
           | the other way around and it was pretty bad UX to wait 1 min
           | to apply a function change to a class or stuff like that.
        
             | wouldbecouldbe wrote:
             | Yeah sometimes you want it but sometimes you dont. I think
             | they are enforcing it to save resources
        
               | jw1224 wrote:
               | Are you using the API, or just the ChatGPT UI? Do custom
               | instructions/system messages help at all?
               | 
               | Saving resources like this seems okay(ish) for general-
               | purpose ChatGPT, as they'd know there's a human who can
               | interpret the abridged output. But for API-driven
               | requests this would be pretty terrible, and makes it far
               | harder to develop with.
        
               | wouldbecouldbe wrote:
               | no the UI, where I ask it to "Please write out entire
               | code with skipping parts."
        
               | nomel wrote:
               | ChatGPT 3 or 4? Try the playground. I've had much better
               | luck with system prompts.
        
         | Wowfunhappy wrote:
         | I can't replicate this.
         | 
         | I tested your prompt verbatim in the OpenAI playground. Model
         | set to gpt-4-0314, maximum length set to 6485 (nothing special
         | about this number, I just dragged the slider to something high-
         | ish), all other settings left at their default.
         | 
         | I cancelled the request when it reached "one thousand one
         | hundred twenty-one" (which took over five minutes), but up
         | until that point it did not take any shortcuts. I haven't
         | meticulously checked every number, but it printed exactly 1,121
         | lines, and a cmd+F for "..." doesn't return anything.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | The inability to resolve issues like the mentioned 5-minute
         | timeout with OpenAI support even after months should be a red
         | flag to not build any products based on their services.
        
           | ilaksh wrote:
           | Can you give me a use case where generating a response for
           | more than five minutes is important or even desirable?
        
           | nomel wrote:
           | There's no real alternatives for a product that would need
           | their service to begin with.
        
         | TheHumanist wrote:
         | I was 'arguing' with it just yesterday about this with some
         | coding work!
         | 
         | I am newer to some things I am currently working on so it's
         | been like a free tutor/mentor. Really nice at times.
         | 
         | But lately, it will go into an explanation with code examples
         | and part way through the code examples it adds things like '#
         | The rest is very similar. Not including for brevity'
         | 
         | Not exact wording of what it says but it is essentially saying
         | that. It is incredibly annoying because I have started telling
         | it not to do that, to include the full code of the example, and
         | it STILL DOES THIS.
         | 
         | No, I'm not getting it to code for me. The examples aren't even
         | things I would use in my code but for teaching me certain
         | concepts along with them walking through them with me which, in
         | the past, worked really well and never had this repetitive
         | issue.
         | 
         | GPT-4 is definitely operating differently.
        
           | nielsole wrote:
           | Oh yeah, I had to write a simple but long Prometheus query.
           | 
           | > [Correctly lists the first fifteen Elements]
           | 
           | > # ... continue for each bucket
           | 
           | > This would be for individual buckets, and you'd have to add
           | more lines for each additional bucket in your range.Given
           | that you have a wide range of buckets, writing this manually
           | could be quite tedious. This is why pre-computing these
           | values with recording rules in Prometheus might be a more
           | scalable solution, but the above should give you an idea of
           | how you could do this in a more manual fashion.
           | 
           | Arguing with the AI who of the two of us has to do the
           | tedious work.
        
         | flir wrote:
         | I've seen that "one, two, skip a few" behaviour converting
         | structured data from Russian to English, and in the occasional
         | programming task. Gotta really emphasise you want the whole
         | document, complete, translated.
         | 
         | But we're fighting an uphill battle against OpenAI's own
         | training, and I really wish we weren't.
         | 
         | I have to wonder if it's coincidence that this behaviour is
         | less computationally intensive.
        
         | gberger wrote:
         | That looks like a timeout configured on the web servebr
        
           | jw1224 wrote:
           | Yes, it seems their servers are terminating responses early.
           | Unfortunately it's undocumented, was introduced unexpectedly
           | one day, and prevents full use of larger context-window
           | models.
           | 
           | It also charges in full for the entire response, which seems
           | to continue running in the background. Definitely a bug at
           | their end.
        
             | pbhjpbhj wrote:
             | Seems like a means to avoid DoS?
        
               | jw1224 wrote:
               | I think it's just some networking misconfiguration they
               | haven't noticed. I can't see them intentionally trying to
               | prevent DoS this way, that's what API key rate limits are
               | for (it would be a very expensive and slow DoS
               | otherwise!).
        
               | charcircuit wrote:
               | >that's what API key rate limits are for
               | 
               | You don't need an API key to make a connection to the
               | API.
        
             | yossi_peti wrote:
             | Since it's 5 minutes I'm wondering if it's just "that's how
             | the web works by default". I remember a while ago I was
             | doing a long-running calculation on an POST request and was
             | trying to debug why the connection always broke after 5
             | minutes, and found the hard way that there's a 5 minute
             | timeout.
        
           | donpark wrote:
           | Very likely. Typical serverless hosts like Vercel times out
           | at 5 minutes.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | I have this too, but on information extraction tasks, if the
         | input document is too long or complex it will skip sections
         | saying something along the lines of
         | 
         | < !-- List of products. Truncated for brevity -- > (instead of
         | the list)
         | 
         | < !-- Shipper details go here -- > (instead of the details)
         | 
         | Very annoying when you want to extract everything and is hard
         | to fix. Maybe they had some examples solved by abbreviation in
         | the fine-tuning set and it damaged the model. It doesn't make
         | sense to train this behaviour into GPT-4.
        
           | antonvs wrote:
           | Using GPT models like that is unreliable anyway.
           | 
           | I was talking to someone who was excited that he was able to
           | use ChatGPT to convert a short tabular text listing of about
           | 70 rows to a comma-separated list of the ids on each row,
           | without having to e.g. import it into a spreadsheet or
           | database. I pointed out that this couldn't be relied on, but
           | he was skeptical. So I checked the output he pasted - there
           | were only 69 ids. It had left out an id from the middle of
           | the list, seemingly at random.
        
       | jiggawatts wrote:
       | The reason for these articles and the frustration people have is
       | that GPT 4 is a black box and is being changed whether we like it
       | or not. Nobody can choose to continue to use a specific snapshot
       | with the alignment that suits them, because a third-party is
       | enforcing their preferred alignment -- and not even specifying
       | what that is!
       | 
       | It's as-if a private company had invented portal technology and
       | used it to establish trade routes with far-off alien
       | civilisations. They even handle the purchase order translation,
       | currency conversion, and so on. It's a miracle! You can order
       | room-temperature superconductors and floaty rocks at a reasonable
       | price.
       | 
       | "Sorry, due to high demand, we had to cut some corners on the
       | translations" comes the announcement.
       | 
       | Now _the entire human race_ sometimes gets copper wire and
       | ordinary rocks.
       | 
       | "You're still trading with the exact same aliens" is the follow-
       | up press release to appease the angry customers.
       | 
       | People point at the clear evidence of almost-but-not-
       | superconductive wire they've received and demand answers.
       | 
       | "No, you do not need to know anything at all about our
       | translation technology. No, you may not visit other planets
       | without our express approval, that _might be dangerous_ to our
       | prof... I mean that might be dangerous to the human race. Yes.
       | Dangerous! _Existential_ , even."
        
         | thefurdrake wrote:
         | I haven't used OpenAI's API, but I might soon, and I've read
         | tangentially that you can specify the checkpoint version in API
         | calls to gpt3.5. Is this not the case with gpt4? Did they
         | backport shitty alignment to older model versions?
        
           | ilaksh wrote:
           | Yes, you can specify the particular snapshot when using the
           | API with gpt-4.
        
             | jiggawatts wrote:
             | Yes, but they deprecate old checkpoints very fast.
             | 
             | You also can't ever use the original version that wasn't
             | aligned to Sam Altman's preferred vision.
             | 
             | By all accounts there is an "alignment tax" that reduces
             | the capability of these systems.
             | 
             | For industrial or large scale public use I would also argue
             | for the well-behaved models to be the only ones used.
             | 
             | For personal experimentation I prefer a sassy AI that tells
             | me I'm wrong. Sam insists I'm too immature and I can't be
             | entrusted with making that choice for myself.
        
       | geraldalewis wrote:
       | > All I want for Christmas is a GPT-4 level model with less
       | obnoxious RLHF, and if it heils Hitler occasionally while
       | crapping out awk code, so be it.
       | 
       | What an ignorant thing to say.
        
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