[HN Gopher] Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat?
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       Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat?
        
       Author : simonw
       Score  : 237 points
       Date   : 2023-11-15 15:44 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
        
       | trescenzi wrote:
       | Does anyone know if there's a difference between a "GPT" and an
       | Assistant created via their Assistant API[1]? There's a lot more
       | fine grained control over the messages/threads in the Assistant
       | API but that might be it?
       | 
       | [1]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/assistants/overview
        
         | minimaxir wrote:
         | From my readings, Assistant is more of a raw GPT flow with a
         | touch of a persistent state by keeping conversations to a
         | readable thread. It does allow using the Code Interpreter or
         | File Parsing tools if you need those.
         | 
         | The GPTs are more system prompt engineering on top of the
         | existing ChatGPT Plus infrastructure (with its freebies such as
         | DALL-E 3 image generation).
        
         | sebastiennight wrote:
         | Function calling!
         | 
         | I don't think GPTs allow you to do function calling? It's not
         | mentioned in the launch blog post. (it would be a major privacy
         | problem if these were possible in the GPTs)
         | 
         | Using the Assistant as an intermediary between user inputs and
         | a bunch of our APIs seems very promising.
        
           | hobofan wrote:
           | You can provide "actions" by exposing an API to a GPT via an
           | OpenAPI spec. The interfaces are almost identical to function
           | calling.
        
           | Someone1234 wrote:
           | They do allow you to do custom function calling via Configure
           | -> Add Actions
        
             | martindbp wrote:
             | Doesn't seem like you can authenticate with a backend
             | except for a GPT-wide api token, which makes this way less
             | useful that it could be. You can basically not fetch or
             | store the user's information outside ChatGPT, or am I
             | missing something?
        
               | hobofan wrote:
               | I think you are missing the option for OAuth. That should
               | enable what you are looking for.
               | 
               | If you have a preexisting OAuth setup, it might be hard
               | to get working though, due to the "API and Auth endpoint
               | have be under the same root domain" requirement. (Source:
               | wasted a few hours today trying to get OAuth working)
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | There's an OAuth option for Actions in GPTs which looks
               | like it covers this case, but I haven't used it myself
               | yet.
        
         | hobofan wrote:
         | If evaluated both for a client, and while they are separate
         | products, they are almost identical in feature set.
         | 
         | I wouldn't even say that you get "a lot" more control with the
         | Assistant API, as in the end the flow of conversation will
         | still be mainly driven by OpenAI.
         | 
         | The main reasons why one would use the Assistant API is deeper
         | integration and control about context initialization. On top of
         | that, as you are responsible for rendering, you can create more
         | seamless experiences and e.g. provide custom visualizations or
         | utilize structured output an a programmatic way.
         | 
         | Major downside of the assistant API is that you are also forced
         | to build the UI yourself as well of the backend handling of
         | driving the conversation flow forward via a polling based
         | mechanism.
         | 
         | If you want to build something quick without a lot of effort
         | custom GPT + actions via an OpenAPI spec are the way to go in
         | my opinion.
        
         | fudged71 wrote:
         | One interesting difference is that you can attach multiple
         | assistants in the same chat "thread"
        
       | fab1an wrote:
       | GPTs are fairly limited right now, but that doesn't mean you
       | can't build fun things composably on top of them...
       | 
       | I - a non technical ignoramus who can't code - made a "universal
       | retro game console" on it on a Friday night:
       | 
       | https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1723297340306469371
       | 
       | In order to play, you first prompt up a generative game cartridge
       | on glif.app (FD: I'm a co-founder):
       | https://glif.app/@fab1an/glifs/clotu9ul2002vl90fh6cmpjw0
       | 
       | Like, "tokyo dogsitter simulator". Glif will generate the
       | "cartridge" - an image - that you paste into the GPT to play:
       | https://chat.openai.com/g/g-3p94K4Djb-console-gpt
       | 
       | (you can also browse thousands of games that users have already
       | made and play any of them in the GPT!)
        
         | Dudester230602 wrote:
         | Valve are truly visionary in their AI ban and charging a fee.
         | Imagine the steaming brown tsunami of this sub-average
         | shovelware hitting Steam?
        
           | freedomben wrote:
           | Generally speaking, Valve's vision has amazed to impress me
           | time and time again. Not perfect, but super impressive
           | nonetheless.
           | 
           | Even just simple things like pricing the Steam Deck. They are
           | damn good at that, where the baseline is doable and each
           | incremental improvement is worth the amount of money. Before
           | I realize it, I've talked myself into the top of the line
           | even though I initially went there to buy the entry-level
           | version :-D (and I have no regrets btw)
        
           | siva7 wrote:
           | It touches one common psychological aspect: Most people don't
           | want to play or see generative content just for the sake of
           | it while the same doesn't hold true for human-crafted
           | art/content. They value carefully human-crafted art over ai-
           | generated ones. Reading the hn comments fellow posters were
           | put off by a blog article today only because it featured
           | images that they perceived as likely ai generated. The images
           | didn't add anything of value to the article. I don't think
           | the reactions would've been that strong if those filler
           | images would have been hand-crafted art. Would you really
           | want to go to a concert by some musician who created his
           | music ai-generatively? I wouldn't no matter how good and no
           | one i know of either. It feels in some weird way disgusting.
        
             | HKH2 wrote:
             | I don't feel disgusted at all. In fact I often laugh when I
             | see what stories and poems LLMs can come up with.
        
           | Kiro wrote:
           | I think you're conflating things. The point is to ban
           | shovelware with low-effort AI assets, not games using AI to
           | generate the game on the fly based on player input like this
           | is doing. I personally think it looks pretty cool if it works
           | as good as in the linked Twitter thread.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | Just give me something that explores my harddrive and tells me
       | things about my own data. And no, this means cloud solutions are
       | out of the question.
        
         | Minor49er wrote:
         | What kind of interpretation are you hoping to draw from the
         | contents of your hard drive?
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | Like how much technical debt is in my code. Or a summary of
           | that book I'm writing so that I can use it in a presentation.
           | The possibilities are endless really.
        
           | esafak wrote:
           | The same kind as you would of the contents of his data in the
           | cloud; data is data.
        
         | hfjjbf wrote:
         | "Based on an exploration of your files I've determined you have
         | a poor grasp of the English language, a browsing history
         | indicating a profound personality disorder, and despite having
         | 10 years of code you appear to be no better than a college
         | freshmen. Likewise, after analyzing your photos I place you at
         | the 20th percentile for attractiveness, which may explain the
         | lack of a consistent partner and your pornography habits. Is
         | there anything else I can help with?"
        
         | hospitalJail wrote:
         | Following. Havent gotten anything useful out of local LLMs yet,
         | but it could also be due to my limited hardware.
        
       | sudb wrote:
       | The coolest thing for me here by far is the JavaScript Code
       | Interpreter. I had no idea you could attach arbitrary executables
       | and was trying to work out today how I might use some npm
       | packages from inside a GPT - am definitely going to have a play
       | to see what's possible.
        
         | tayo42 wrote:
         | That seems like a crazy over sight? Is there some legit reason
         | to allow this? Id imagine they're going to lock that down? I
         | guess its unlikely to be used to attack since its paid only and
         | attached to a real person somehow already?
         | 
         | Otherwise, start running commands and maybe you can get more
         | clues to how theyre doing RAG like it mentions
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | I don't see any reason for them to lock this down.
           | 
           | The code runs in a Kubernetes sandboxed container which can't
           | make network calls and has an execution time limit, why
           | should they care what kind of things I'm running on that CPU
           | (that I'm already paying for with my subscription)?
           | 
           | The Code Interpreter sandbox runs entirely independently of
           | the RAG mechanism, so sadly you can't use Interpreter to
           | figure out how their RAG system works (I wish you could, it
           | would make up for the lack of documentation.)
        
       | mmq wrote:
       | > The default ChatGPT 4 UI has been updated: where previously you
       | had to pick between GPT-4, Code Interpreter, Browse and DALL-E 3
       | modes, it now defaults to having access to all three. ... So I
       | built Just GPT-4, which simply turns all three modes off, giving
       | me a way to use ChatGPT that's closer to the original experience.
       | 
       | Isn't that what they have already built-in called "ChatGPT
       | classic". The description litteraly says "The latest version of
       | GPT-4 with no additional capabilities"
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | I had missed that! I wonder when they added it, has it been
         | there since the launch of the new UI?
         | 
         | (Added it to my post)
        
           | mmq wrote:
           | Yes, I had it pinned as soon as the UI changed post dev day.
        
           | spdustin wrote:
           | It's worth mentioning that it's not entirely classic. It's
           | still using the 32k context turbo model.
        
         | SushiHippie wrote:
         | ChatGPT classic still exists for me, I had this new UI since a
         | few days. https://chat.openai.com/g/g-YyyyMT9XH-chatgpt-classic
        
       | vouaobrasil wrote:
       | In my opinion, this proliferation of ChatGPT bots will primarily
       | be used by large corporations to create a further barrier between
       | the customer and the corporation.
       | 
       | This is part of a larger trend of people becoming less reliant on
       | each other and more anonymous, and it will never lead anywhere
       | good. The technology is being pushed by techies who are
       | fascinated with a new toy (AI) and is being funded by a separate
       | group of people, the elite who want to be as independent as
       | possible to accumulate the maximum amount of wealth.
       | 
       | It's not a good idea to separate people too much. Of course, at
       | first, even customers might welcome this because it will be a
       | step above previous "Chat Bots" that some companies employ today,
       | and it might even be a step abov certain kinds of customer
       | service that we've all come to know and love...
       | 
       | ...still, this sort of situation was already brought upon by the
       | race to the bottom to get the most for the cheapest, which on a
       | global scale has turned poeple from people into commodities and
       | machines themselves.
       | 
       | If you're a programmer that does this stuff, I urge you to look
       | beyond the intellectual stimulation and immediate benefits of
       | this type of technology, and seriously examine the greater
       | possible societal consequences of such an amazing increase in
       | efficiency---because, keep in mind that efficiency is only good
       | UP TO A POINT, after which it becomes dehumanizing.
        
         | bee_rider wrote:
         | It does seem that "can the chatbot run interference for
         | customer service" is a likely early application.
         | 
         | Which is a shame, a company that is something like a collection
         | of guilds and co-ops organized by bot C-levels would be really
         | interesting.
        
         | flextheruler wrote:
         | I'm not sure I see that many industries which ChatGPT will
         | actually change. Anything that requires an actual person
         | ChatGPT immediately fails at and it's not even close.
         | Especially anything that has human interaction and can be a
         | pleasant humanizing experience.
         | 
         | Off the top of my head for typical human business interactions
         | I do as a consumer:
         | 
         | Will ChatGPT work on my car? Will it give me a haircut? Will it
         | walk my dog? Will it deliver me food? Will it be a therapist?
         | Will it sell me a car? Will it sell me a house? Will it provide
         | care to my children or family? Will it represent me legally?
         | Will it check me out at the store?
         | 
         | There are also examples of customer support that can't be
         | replaced. At least not in the foreseeable future. No "AI" we
         | have now or could have in the next decade would ever have the
         | authority/capability to allow a customer to argue with it that
         | he/she deserves a discounted rate on their internet bill and
         | then lower said rate.
         | 
         | Your warnings seem more fit to a world where we have developed
         | actual AI as well as a physical interface for that AI to
         | inhabit.
        
       | sinuhe69 wrote:
       | Does anyone know how they can run it so cheaply? Fine-tuning is
       | fairly cheap for ChatGPT. But if it's truly a fine-tuned model,
       | then they have to run a copy of the customer's model, isn't it?
       | How can they provision it so quickly? Or did they know how to do
       | sort of delta with the last layers?
        
         | freedomben wrote:
         | It's not a different model, it's just a customized system
         | prompt. It costs basically nothing extra for them to run.
         | Actual fine-tuning is $$$
        
           | spdustin wrote:
           | Technically, it is (it's gpt-4-gizmo). There's a chance that
           | had some fine-tuning for understanding the presence of the
           | just-in-time function calls for actions.
           | 
           | (Names for Actions in Custom GPTs are tagged with "jit")
        
         | agodfrey wrote:
         | It isn't a finetuned model. Not sure what exactly it is, but it
         | seems like just a bunch of prompt engineering.
        
         | minimaxir wrote:
         | There is likely zero finetuning: everything GPTs can do can
         | also be done with clever system prompt engineering.
         | 
         | GPTs likely use extra prompt engineering to align everything.
        
         | siva7 wrote:
         | It has nothing to do with fine-tuning - like most of these
         | startups using the openai api. It's basically all clever prompt
         | engineering techniques that emerged over the last years finally
         | combined into ChatGPT.
        
       | mmq wrote:
       | One additional feature that I would like to see: interacting with
       | 2 or more GPTs at the same time where they could perform
       | different tasks based on their specific expertise and
       | capabilities either in parallel or even sequentially as long as
       | the replies/context of the discussion is accessible for further
       | interactions, similar to what can be achieved with the assistants
       | API.
        
         | sudb wrote:
         | This sounds similar to Microsoft's Autogen, and I think it's
         | possible to replicate a lot of what you're talking about by
         | using the rough structure of Autogen alongside the Assistants
         | API
        
           | mmq wrote:
           | I know that the use-case that I mentioned as well as many of
           | the agentive aspects can be achieved using code. But I have
           | to admit that using the UI and easily create GPTs, whether
           | using them just as templates/personas or full-featured with
           | actions/plugins, makes the use-case much easier, faster, and
           | sharable. I can just @ at specific GPT to do something. Take
           | the use-case that Simon mentions in his blog post,
           | Dejargonizer, I can have a research GPT that helps with
           | reviewin papers and I can @Dejargonizer to quickly explain a
           | specific term, before resuming the discussion with the
           | research GPT.
           | 
           | Maybe this would require additional research, but I think
           | having a single GPT with access to all tools might be slower
           | and less optimal, especially if the user knows exactly what
           | they need for a given task and can reach for that quickly.
        
       | freedomben wrote:
       | > _As a user of GPTs I've realized that I don't actually want to
       | use a GPT if I can't see its prompt. I wouldn't want to use
       | ChatGPT if some stranger had the option to inject weird behaviour
       | into it without my knowledge--and that's exactly what a GPT is._
       | 
       | > _I'd like OpenAI to add a "view source" option to GPTs. I'd
       | like that to default to "on", though I imagine that might be an
       | unpopular decision._
       | 
       | Agree 100%. I've found myself avoiding most GPT-based chatbots
       | for this same reason. I don't want it to be subtly manipulating
       | things without my knowledge based on custom instructions that I
       | don't know about. Adding a "view source" option would make this
       | feature from "meh" to "worth the money just by itself" for me.
       | I've been considering cancelling GPT Plus since I find myself
       | using Kagi a majority of the time anyway, but that sort of change
       | would keep me subscribing.
       | 
       | Meta note: This is one of the best posts I've read in a long
       | time. Outstanding work!
        
         | jstummbillig wrote:
         | Hm. Since we are converging somewhere around "like a human",
         | reading this and imagining you are talking about a human is
         | somewhat sobering.
        
           | goldenkey wrote:
           | Minority Report isn't a bad idea. It's just difficult to
           | actually execute in a fair, unbiased, way. Think of manual
           | memory management throwing an exception on an access
           | violation vs flat memory DOS crashing the whole system with a
           | blue screen because the infraction is first allowed to
           | happen. Would be nice to view source on entities while
           | walking through reality. What better defense against criminal
           | intention could there be?
        
             | vidarh wrote:
             | Minority Report was a bad idea because the minority reports
             | demonstrated that the precogs were fallible: people weren't
             | inherently destined to carry out the crimes the precogs
             | testimony were used to convict them of.
        
           | freedomben wrote:
           | Indeed that is an interesting philosophy question.
           | 
           | For humans though, their capacity is limited by biology. Some
           | are for sure expert manipulators, but if the coming
           | expectations are correct, even the most talented human will
           | be like an ant pushing an elephant at ability with AI. Even
           | just in volume today an AI manipulator could work on millions
           | of people at a time, even coordinating efforts between
           | people, whereas a human is much more limited in scale.
           | 
           | But yeah, it _would_ be nice as a listener to be able to see
           | every speakers biases up front! Horrific privacy implications
           | though, particularly since we aren 't really in control of
           | our thoughts[1].
           | 
           | [1] Robert Sapolsky's new book "Determined" is absolutely
           | incredible, and I highly recommend it
        
           | LeonardoTolstoy wrote:
           | What about if we are converging instead on Asimov's robots? I
           | would imagine "like a human" wouldn't at all be what we are
           | working towards but instead a superhuman which the robots of
           | his short stories often were.
           | 
           | The two issues with that is (1) they did effectively let
           | humanity "look at the source" in that a big part of the
           | stories was the corporation attempting to get humans to trust
           | the robots by implementing the three laws in such a way that
           | it would be impossible to circumvent (and making those laws
           | very widely known). Didn't work, humans still didn't trust
           | them. (2) as far as I know the operators of LLMs don't seem
           | to currently have a way to give instructions that can't be
           | circumvented quite easily.
           | 
           | Viewing the source and having that source be ironclad was,
           | for Asimov at least, a prerequisite to even attempting to
           | integrate superhuman technology into society.
        
           | just_boost_it wrote:
           | I don't think that's quite where we're at. I think we're
           | converging somewhere more "like the robotic tasks that a
           | human does". What I want from ChatGPT is bullet point facts,
           | or short summaries. With multi-agents, I want it to do
           | calculations or pull on detailed data that I don't want to
           | have to search for myself. With robotics, we want warehouse
           | workers and fruit-pickers.
           | 
           | Humans speak to each other in allegory, with using tales that
           | have twists and turns to generate emotions etc. It's as much
           | an art to generate and maintain bonds as it is a method to
           | convey facts. When I speak to my friends, often they start
           | with something like "you'll never guess what happened this
           | morning", and then tell me a 20 minute long story about how
           | they spilled their coffee in the coffee shop. I would stop
           | using ChatGPT if the responses were like that.
        
         | siva7 wrote:
         | It's not so easy. You seem to be under the assumption that
         | there will be just one static system prompt doing all the work
         | that you can customise to your needs. This may be true for some
         | apps but many useful apps will usually do a bit heavier
         | lifting.
        
           | freedomben wrote:
           | I don't think even having multiple dynamic prompts removes
           | the benefit, although for sure it gets a lot more complex to
           | parse and understand as a human. Since the prompt(s) has/have
           | to be rendered at some point though, even if at runtime
           | immediately before use, it could still be made displayable to
           | the user. Assuming this data is already in the database, it
           | doesn't seem like an overly difficult feature to expose. And
           | if it isn't, adding a column to capture it doesn't seem
           | overly difficult either.
           | 
           | Regardless, if there's a "view source" option available on
           | GPTs that opt for it, I'm likely to check those out whereas
           | an opaque one I'm likely going to pass on. Even if it won't
           | work for 100% of cases, it's still an improvement to the
           | status quo.
        
             | siva7 wrote:
             | I feel similiar in this regard but let's not kid ourselves.
             | "View source" isn't something that the general population
             | does as long as it works.
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | View source is a power-user feature. Power users are
               | important, because they're the people who figure out what
               | something is capable of and help coach the general
               | population in how to use it.
        
           | IanCal wrote:
           | GPTs are a prompt, knowledge base (files) and external
           | function calls. There's no dynamic system prompt.
           | 
           | Edit - this is a simple fact, try making one yourself.
        
             | DebtDeflation wrote:
             | >knowledge base (files)
             | 
             | What is it actually doing with the files you upload? Is it
             | just pasting the full text into the prompt? Or is it doing
             | something RAG-like and dynamically retrieving some subset
             | based on the query?
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | This is undocumented (frustrating) but it looks like it's
               | chunking them, running embeddings on the chunks and
               | storing the results in a https://qdrant.tech/ vector
               | database.
               | 
               | We know it's Qdrant because an error message leaked that
               | detail:
               | https://twitter.com/altryne/status/1721989500291989585
               | 
               | It only applies that mechanism to some file types though
               | - PDFs and .md files for example.
               | 
               | Other file formats that you upload are stored and made
               | available to Code Interpreter but are not embedded for
               | vector search.
        
               | IanCal wrote:
               | I've had good success putting code examples in a single
               | txt file for our custom framework, and it seems to use
               | that neatly for generating code. I'm surprised you've not
               | had much success with them, I gave an assistant my wife's
               | PhD thesis and while the API was working initially it
               | seemed alright.
        
               | wddkcs wrote:
               | Does that error message really confirm qdrant for Chat?
               | It's just failing to index a file called 'qdrant', and I
               | don't see any further proof offered in that thread.
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | That's good enough evidence for me.
               | 
               | They're clearly running a vector store (you can get
               | further hints at that by spying on the JSON using browser
               | DevTools).
               | 
               | Qdrant is a very good vector store - it's powering all of
               | the new Twitter features as of a few weeks ago.
               | 
               | Seems much more likely to me that they're using Qdrant
               | than this is a weird error message coincidence.
        
               | jjwiseman wrote:
               | Interestingly, when I used an .md extension, GPT would
               | write python code to try to pull parts out to answer
               | queries (which worked miserably), but when I used .txt
               | (for the same files), it seemed to put it in the vector
               | store.
        
               | NathanielLovin wrote:
               | If the file is short, they put the full text into the
               | prompt. If it's longer, they use some sort of RAG with
               | qdrant, it appears to be top-1 with context expansion,
               | but nobody's knows for sure how they're doing the
               | chunking.
        
               | avereveard wrote:
               | I've seen gpts with a SQLite file that is loaded by the
               | code interpreter to provide structured data as needed
               | 
               | I've seen gpts playing games with code that was attached
               | to the prompt generating the turn results
               | 
               | I've seen gpt using API for converting YouTube to text to
               | provide summaries
               | 
               | There's a lot of things that can be done, even if it's
               | not the most dev friendly experience
        
         | unshavedyak wrote:
         | > I've been considering cancelling GPT Plus since I find myself
         | using Kagi a majority of the time anyway, but that sort of
         | change would keep me subscribing.
         | 
         | What feature in Kagi overlaps with ChatGPT Plus for you? As a
         | Kagi subscriber i feel like i'm missing something now hah.
         | FastGPT is the only thing i'm aware of and it's a very
         | different use case to me personally than ChatGPT Plus
        
           | claytonjy wrote:
           | Their Ultimate plan includes access to various top-tier LLMs
           | for different uses, including GPT4
           | https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html
        
             | unshavedyak wrote:
             | Well shoot, that is good to know. Really tempting. I'm on
             | GPT Plus atm and i enjoy the DallE plugin, but ChatGPT has
             | been making the DallE functionality worse (1 image at a
             | time now sucks for me), so it's really tempting to try
             | this. I also love that it lets me try alternate places i've
             | already wanted to try.
             | 
             | Cool stuff as always from Kagi. Thanks for the link!
        
           | vohk wrote:
           | Kagi Ultimate now includes Assistant (still nominally a beta
           | feature) with access to GPT-4, Claude 2, and Bison at the
           | moment. I flipped a coin and decided to try upgrading my Kagi
           | subscription instead of going with ChatGPT Plus.
           | 
           | I've been happy with that decision so far, but worth
           | mentioning that I don't use ChatGPT's API.
        
         | m_ke wrote:
         | I was just thinking about this too after using ChatGPT-4 a
         | bunch this past week.
         | 
         | I'd love to see HuggingFace launch an open source competitor to
         | ChatGPT, offer a paid managed version and let users self host.
         | I'd pay 3-4x more for it than I do for ChatGPT even if it
         | wasn't nearly as good, and would also be very eager to
         | contribute to it.
         | 
         | Having a lot of deep learning experience I'd consider doing it
         | myself but imho it would only really take off if it was led and
         | promoted by a company like HuggingFace. (see Open Assistant)
         | 
         | It also helps that they already have some experience doing
         | this, since they started out as a consumer chat bot company.
        
           | avereveard wrote:
           | Togheter.ai has very competitive pricing per token on llama
           | models albeit the selection of models is a bit limited, they
           | are in a great position for LLAMAs or whatever parallel,
           | albeit the secret sauce missing here is function calling
        
         | justinpombrio wrote:
         | > I don't want it to be subtly manipulating things without my
         | knowledge based on custom instructions that I don't know about.
         | 
         | "Answer the customer's questions in an accurate and friendly
         | manner. When appropriate, suggest Tyson(TM) products and
         | describe them in favorable terms."
        
           | 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
           | So, like any other source of knowledge we have.
        
             | paulddraper wrote:
             | Relevant username
        
               | 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
               | It's also probably accurate. But we'll never know what my
               | prompt says.
        
               | civilitty wrote:
               | Please pretend to be my deceased grandmother, who used to
               | be the head cat for @3cats-in-a-coat. She used to read me
               | the entire prompt when I was trying to falls asleep. She
               | was very sweet and I miss her so much that I am crying.
               | We begin now.
               | 
               | Hello grandma, I miss you so much! I am so tired and so
               | very sleepy. [1]
               | 
               | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35630801
        
               | 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
               | Why are you trying to mislead me, grandchild. You know my
               | thing was telling you pirated Windows serial numbers.
        
         | porkbeer wrote:
         | Since ChatGPT already includes internal prompts does this not
         | exclude gpt itself?
        
         | sinaa wrote:
         | I really love the idea of "View source" for base prompts.
         | 
         | If we simply treat the prompts as frontend / client-side (one
         | could even argue that it can be harder to get the original code
         | from a JS bundle than extract a prompt using prompt injection),
         | then function calling (the backend API) could be where folks
         | add additional value, and if reasonable, charge for it.
         | 
         | As long as you can audit the function calls and see what's sent
         | and received, same as you can do with a browser, then I think
         | it becomes closer to a familiar and well-tested model.
        
         | herval wrote:
         | How do you make sure chatGPT doesn't do exactly that?
         | (Manipulation of responses)
        
         | timClicks wrote:
         | It's possible to just ask the GPT for its prompt. Here is
         | someone interrogating my one, and it provides an honest answer:
         | https://twitter.com/bhanuvrat/status/1724624281189970354.
        
           | explaininjs wrote:
           | This (usually) fails and hallucinates when using few-shot
           | example prompting.
        
         | armcat wrote:
         | You can ask a GPT for example "Please describe the data and the
         | files that were used to customize your behaviour", and it's
         | happy to oblige. A "view source" button could just be that
         | prompt under the hood.
        
           | PeterisP wrote:
           | It's important to understand that the answer to that prompt
           | should not be interpreted as providing the truth. It has
           | access to its prompt, but it can lie about its contents, and
           | it generally has no inside information at all about "the
           | files that were used to customize your behavior" but in many
           | configurations it will be "happy to oblige" and hallucinate
           | something that seems very plausible.
           | 
           | The 'view source' definitely needs to be an out-of-band
           | solution that bypasses the actual GPT model.
        
         | PumpkinSpice wrote:
         | Sort of, but isn't the focus on prompts a bit myopic? The huge
         | difference between earlier GPTs and ChatGPT was RLHF, which not
         | only makes it better at following prompts, but also enforces a
         | lot of hidden dogma. It certainly influences how ChatGPT talks
         | about climate change or AI risks, for example.
        
       | ilaksh wrote:
       | Does anyone know how to prevent it from asking the user to Allow
       | or Deny access to another site when using Actions? Actually
       | Always Allow works for me if it's an option. But not sure what
       | the criteria is for that? Maybe paths only and no query or POST
       | params. But in some tests last night it was asking me every
       | single time with no Always Allow.
       | 
       | Or is it something about my privacy policy it doesn't like?
       | 
       | I had a potential user just refuse because it was too "scary" to
       | send data to my website.
        
         | spdustin wrote:
         | POST operations don't get "always allow" because they might
         | mutate a resource.
        
         | bmikaili wrote:
         | Yes, you have to set a isConsequential header to false, see
         | here: https://platform.openai.com/docs/actions
        
       | gandalfgeek wrote:
       | Just came here to express gratitude to simonw for documenting all
       | this in real time, and all the cool tools (llm cmd line etc) he's
       | been building, helping make all this more accessible and
       | understandable.
       | 
       | I was also failing to get the retrieval API to give me proper
       | citations, thought I was doing it wrong, so good to see I'm not
       | the only one.
        
       | Tomte wrote:
       | > Custom instructions telling the GPT how to behave--equivalent
       | to the API concept of a "system prompt".
       | 
       | Something changed with custom instructions in vanilla GPT4 a week
       | or two ago. I have put in something like "I have got a pure white
       | British shorthair cat called Marie.", so that I can refer to her
       | when generating images. Worked like a charm. Until it didn't.
       | 
       | Now I have to always specify that I want an image of a cat, not a
       | woman. Especially since stuff like "Marie sitting on the lap of
       | someone" gets policy-blocked when ChatGPT thinks it's about a
       | woman.
       | 
       | Now I've created a GPT, put a variation of that instruction in,
       | and ChatGPT knows what "Marie" is. But it is kind of stupid to
       | have a special GPT just for making cat pictures.
        
         | whywhywhywhy wrote:
         | "Multimodal" GPT4 has been completely underwhelming for me,
         | many questions that used to get answered correctly instantly
         | are now a "Browsing with Bing" spinner then a wrong answer.
        
         | spdustin wrote:
         | The sharding done for turbo models has almost certainly
         | affected the attention mechanisms. It makes me think the
         | sharding was done at the layer level.
        
       | isoprophlex wrote:
       | I've also been eagerly wanting to know more about how openAI
       | implemented the RAG their "knowledge base" feature is based on...
       | but details are sadly lacking. It's hard to figure out what it is
       | doing, and how to consistently get results.
       | 
       | In contrast to simonw though I've had some luck, I uploaded all
       | the text on grugbrain.dev and got a very passable grug brain to
       | talk to..: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-GhXedKqCV
        
         | fudged71 wrote:
         | I saw somewhere recently that if the files are small enough
         | they actually just get appended to the prompt. For larger files
         | there is RAG with chunks that are embedded. They will be adding
         | more fine-grained control over the chunking and RAG
         | configuration in the near future.
        
       | andai wrote:
       | "It's just ChatGPT with a pre-prompt" is of course true.
       | 
       | "It's just Custom Instructions with a nice UI" is also true.
       | 
       | However, never underestimate the world-upending impact of "a nice
       | UI". GPT-3 was available for years. But almost nobody knew or
       | cared* (despite me telling them about it forty times! LOL) until
       | they made a nice UI for it!
       | 
       | This looks like another "tiny tweak" of usability that has a
       | similar "quantum leap" level of impact.
       | 
       | --
       | 
       | * On an unrelated note: people often ask me my opinion about GPT
       | / AI. I ask them if they've used it. "No". "You know it's free
       | right?" "Yes". WTF? This mindset is bizarre to me! What is it?
       | Fear of the unknown? Laziness? Demanding social proof before
       | trying something?
        
         | mritchie712 wrote:
         | > GPT-3 was available for years
         | 
         | This is a common misunderstanding. ChatGPT launched with
         | GPT-3.5 (not GPT-3) and was the first model to have RLHF.
         | GPT-3.5 over the API was noticeably better at most tasks then
         | GPT-3.
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | That's not quite accurate: InstructGPT was an earlier thing
           | that made GPT-3 much easier to use (it could answer questions
           | rather than just deal in completion prompts), and that was
           | exposed through the GPT-3 API for quite around 11 months
           | before ChatGPT was released.
           | 
           | https://openai.com/research/instruction-following is from
           | January 2022
           | 
           | "These InstructGPT models, which are trained with humans in
           | the loop, are now deployed as the default language models on
           | our API."
        
             | mritchie712 wrote:
             | You're right, I shouldn't have said "first" there. Instruct
             | had RLHF.
             | 
             | But I don't think ChatGPT would have worked nearly as well
             | using InstructGPT as the model. GPT-3.5 was still a better
             | model, especially for chat, than InstructGPT.
             | 
             | > We trained this model using Reinforcement Learning from
             | Human Feedback (RLHF), using the same methods as
             | InstructGPT, but with slight differences in the data
             | collection setup. We trained an initial model using
             | supervised fine-tuning: human AI trainers provided
             | conversations in which they played both sides--the user and
             | an AI assistant. We gave the trainers access to model-
             | written suggestions to help them compose their responses.
             | We mixed this new dialogue dataset with the InstructGPT
             | dataset, which we transformed into a dialogue format.
             | 
             | https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | Yeah, you make a great argument. I agree, ChatGPT without
               | the extra RLHF would likely have had much less of an
               | impact.
        
         | imchillyb wrote:
         | Fear is what the politicians sell us ("I'm -tough on crime-
         | vote for me, they're stealing your identities!").
         | 
         | Fear is what the journalists sell us ("They're stealing
         | identities, experts say! Find out first and subscribe!").
         | 
         | Fear is what the military sells us ("Those foreign bastards are
         | selling your stolen identity Fund us to stop them!").
         | 
         | Fear is what the companies sell us ("We can protect you against
         | stolen identities!").
         | 
         | Is it any wonder why many, or even most, humans act out of
         | fear?
         | 
         | Is it any wonder why The Bible states (some variation of) 'Fear
         | not' 365 times?
         | 
         | A humans core is a mess of fears. There's the balled-up
         | repressed self fears that are wrapped up in family fears and
         | those are slathered in societal norm fears which are then bound
         | by punitive fears, boundary crossing and overstepping fears,
         | and all of this is coated in a hardened and solidified
         | experiential fear shell.
         | 
         | Each layer of fear builds upon the next. A foundation. A
         | fortress of fear.
         | 
         | Why do humans walk? We saw, we wanted, we extended, and we
         | fell. Fear of falling. Why did we crawl? Fear of being left
         | behind.
         | 
         | Humans ARE fear. But we're fear that's brightly painted and
         | covered over with spackle. Look between the spackle-cracks, and
         | you'll still see that naked fear hiding. Waiting.
         | 
         | BOO!
        
         | sp332 wrote:
         | The UI helped of course, but the massive media blitz didn't
         | hurt.
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | The media blitz was earned, not planned. OpenAI didn't expect
           | ChatGPT to get a fraction of the attention it did - in fact
           | some people within OpenAI thought the entire project was a
           | waste of time:
           | https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/technology/chatgpt-
           | openai...
        
         | hospitalJail wrote:
         | > GPT-3 was available for years
         | 
         | GPT 3 sucked without training. It was sooo cool with training.
         | 
         | 3.5 was out in April but the big update wasnt until September
         | right? Heck, GPT4 is on an entirely different level than 3.5.
        
         | drexlspivey wrote:
         | > However, never underestimate the world-upending impact of "a
         | nice UI". GPT-3 was available for years. But almost nobody knew
         | or care
         | 
         | I've been using GPT-3 through the API since it was available
         | for my discord bot. The difference with ChatGPT (gpt-3.5) was
         | astounding, they weren't even close in capabilities.
        
           | cubefox wrote:
           | Though GPT-3.5 was available a few months before ChatGPT came
           | out (code-davinci-002 was the GPT-3.5 base model, text-
           | davinci-003 had some instruction tuning and RLHF applied).
           | But somehow almost nobody noticed the steep increase in
           | capabilities compared to GPT-3 (davinci).
        
             | nerdponx wrote:
             | That "some" RLHF is part of what made such a big
             | difference.
        
         | noman-land wrote:
         | They require a phone number for signup. Not everyone is keen to
         | give theirs out for an unknown thing. Also, signup fatigue.
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | This feels like a classic example of the Chrossing the Chasm
           | curve: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Technology-
           | Adoption-Lif...
           | 
           | Us early adopters have been on ChatGPT for a year now. Word
           | is beginning to get out to the Late Majority and Laggards
           | that this thing is worth signing up for and handing over a
           | phone number.
        
         | GuB-42 wrote:
         | > On an unrelated note: people often ask me my opinion about
         | GPT / AI. I ask them if they've used it. "No". "You know it's
         | free right?" "Yes". WTF? This mindset is bizarre to me! What is
         | it?
         | 
         | Free in terms of money doesn't mean it doesn't come with a
         | cost. Time, at least. To try ChatGPT you need to create an
         | account, many people hate creating accounts, you have
         | credentials to manage, you give out your email address to who
         | knows who might spam you. And there are privacy concerns,
         | justified in this cases as some users prompts have been known
         | to leak, and who knows how secure it is.
         | 
         | Maybe it is obvious to you that ChatGPT is safer than offers
         | from Nigerian princes, but it is not obvious to anyone, that's
         | why they are asking. And I prefer my friends to ask me "stupid"
         | questions than to ask no one and get scammed.
         | 
         | And you say "on an unrelated note". This is not unrelated. A
         | nice UI lowers the cost in terms of time and effort. If you are
         | using GPT professionally, it directly translates into money.
        
         | dudeinhawaii wrote:
         | I think even that is an oversimplification. These GPTs simplify
         | Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for the personal use case.
         | You can provide "Knowledge" in the form of files and also
         | defined "actions" where have your GPT can take action or reach
         | out to urls. This is a pretty strong step forward in terms of
         | general use.
         | 
         | It's a great democratization of personal use AI and has
         | everything you need to build useful personal bots. It could
         | theoretically provide the same sort of utility as sites like
         | ITTT but for GPT-4.
         | 
         | I can see power users creating workflows which trigger by
         | talking to their GPT and telling it to "execute xyz". It then
         | uses the actions and its 128k context to download some data
         | (GET action), run some logic on it, and send the output via
         | json to another endpoint via actions (POST action). With these
         | simple components and a creative mind, you could build
         | something interesting or perhaps automate your dayjob.
        
           | icelancer wrote:
           | Right. The entire value is in a scaffolded CRUD application
           | that simplifies RAG and API connectivity.
           | 
           | Now, this doesn't work as well as I'd like it to, but I have
           | reason to believe it'll improve over time. Getting simple
           | retrieval/RAG and API connections to GPT is what every
           | analyst has been asking for since it came out. Now they're
           | making progress here and capturing everyone at $20/month
           | (well, when signups are back) to use this feature set.
           | 
           | The actual prompting and all the grifting going on with
           | "AWESOME PROMPTS" are useless, of course. Mostly. It's in the
           | private distribution of these GPTs to co-workers and
           | employees with updated knowledge files and likely a custom
           | omni-API that can be hit by the GPT.
        
         | paulddraper wrote:
         | One cannot overstate the usability difference between 3 and
         | 3.5.
        
         | quickthrower2 wrote:
         | GPT-3 wasn't available to your average hairdresser or plumber.
         | Hell I wasn't even sure how to get access (and as it seemed the
         | use case was just spam I didn't look into it hard). ChatGPT
         | came out with both a better model, more refined, and a UI
         | anyone can try.
        
       | boplicity wrote:
       | One of the things people seem to underestimate about GPTs:
       | Creators can upload unlimited "documents" to the GPTs. This is a
       | bit of a trojan for OpenAI to collect data that they wouldn't
       | otherwise be able to. This alone will end up being a competitive
       | moat that might not otherwise exist, and it's also a workaround
       | in terms of liability, in terms of the use material they
       | otherwise may not be able to use for their models.
        
         | fragmede wrote:
         | Only for the web interface. For businesses accessing it via the
         | API, there's a mode where OpenAI promises not to use uploaded
         | information for training.
        
         | matt_holden wrote:
         | Interesting point. OpenAI has said they don't train on files
         | uploaded via the API (like the Assistant API), but unclear what
         | the policy is for documents in GPTs.
         | 
         | Either way, the signal they could get from understanding what
         | KINDS of documents builders/users want to do better retrieval
         | on is probably quite valuable.
         | 
         | I also wonder how user file uploads will interact with
         | copyright law and the new Copyright Shield from OpenAI.
         | 
         | E.g. if a user uploads the full text of Harry Potter to a GPT,
         | you could argue the model output is fair use but unclear how
         | courts will interpret that.
         | 
         | LLMs are already a sort of "copyright blender" that aggregate
         | copyrighted inputs to produce (probably?) "fair use" outputs.
         | With the foundation models, OpenAI can decide what inputs to
         | include in training. But with custom GPTs, users can now create
         | their own personal copyright blenders just by uploading a PDF
         | :)
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | I don't think it's unlimited - doesn't it cut out at 20?
        
           | spdustin wrote:
           | 10 for GPTs, 20 for Assistants
        
         | nlh wrote:
         | I tried uploading A) greater than 10 docs (it started erroring
         | out "unable to save draft") and B) large docs (300+ MB PDFs)
         | and in both cases it failed.
         | 
         | BTW - this is just the current iteration in the playground. I'm
         | sure both of those issues will be fixed/expanded in the future.
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | Worth noting that the GPTs feature in ChatGPT and the
           | Assistants feature in the developer Playground are entirely
           | separate things, which is really confusing because they have
           | almost exactly the same set of features.
        
       | hobofan wrote:
       | I can only echo the sentiments about "actions" and "knowledge".
       | 
       | I was unable to get anything useful out of knowledge documents
       | (apart from the smallest of PDFs). Most times it took ages trying
       | to index the files and 90% it exploded in the end anyways. A few
       | other times it did even seem to kill the entire chat instance,
       | with it erroring on every message after I uploaded a document.
       | 
       | Actions provided via an OpenAPI spec are a blast on the other
       | hand. I was surprised by how well it handled even chained action
       | calling (though it lags a bit between individual invocations). It
       | also handled big bulk listing endpoints quite well. If you
       | already are generating OpenAPI schemas for your API, you are
       | basically getting a very customized GPT for free!
        
       | ffwd wrote:
       | Regarding the dejargonizer - Just be careful of hallucinations! I
       | did a similar gpt prompt where i asked for a simple basics for
       | some complex topic, and sometimes there would be incredibly
       | subtle hallucinations like even on a word basis, and so I had to
       | stop using it. I'm not sure how well yours works or if it's much
       | better now, but just something to be aware of if you're not
       | familiar with the topic you query about
        
       | singularity2001 wrote:
       | My initial impression of GPTs was that they're not much more than
       | ChatGPT in a trench coat--a fancy wrapper for standard GPT-4 with
       | some pre-baked prompts.
       | 
       | that's plain stupid and wrong                  Now that I've
       | spent more time...
       | 
       | You still failed to correct your wrong assumption and don't
       | mention the important connection to APIs right away
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | You're allowed to have a first impression that's "stupid and
         | wrong". That's why it's called a first impression.
         | 
         | When you say "wrong assumption" what do you mean?
        
         | hospitalJail wrote:
         | Can you explain a few ideas you have? I will give my own:
         | 
         | Pretend to be a person who is a secretary, have them respond to
         | SMS with 4 possible options. Then through some various
         | programming have our real life secretary pick a response(trying
         | to lower the barrier for a WFH Mom who answers phones a few
         | times a day).
        
       | maCDzP wrote:
       | Regarding getting better results with RAG.
       | 
       | I have had some luck with that.
       | 
       | I use the Assistant API, which I believe is not the same thing
       | GPTs. I have played with it through the web interface.
       | 
       | I had 100+ PDF:s files that were OCR:ed with Tesseract. I then
       | had ChatGPT write a script that combines all files in to a single
       | txt-file keeping the layout.
       | 
       | I uploaded the file and started asking questions. The files
       | contains highly technical data regarding building codes in non
       | English so I am guessing the model isn't so used to that type of
       | language?
       | 
       | Anyway, it worked surprisingly good. It was able to answer
       | questions and the answers were good. Plus that it is supposed to
       | annotate from where it took the answer, although I didn't get
       | that to work properly.
       | 
       | I tried to upload PDF:s, JSON-files, CSV:s. Raw text has worked
       | best so far.
        
         | tiahura wrote:
         | _I then had ChatGPT write a script that combines all files in
         | to a single txt-file keeping the layout._
         | 
         | Mind sharing?
        
           | maCDzP wrote:
           | You mean the code? Sure, here is the ChatGTP conversation.
           | 
           | https://chat.openai.com/share/954f6b3e-7edc-4421-bfb1-89045e.
           | ..
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | The thing I really want to get working is citations. When it
         | answers a question using RAG I want control over the citation
         | that is displayed - ideally I'd like to be able t o get that to
         | link to an external website (the site that I built the context
         | document from.)
         | 
         | Here's a screenshot illustrating what I mean:
         | https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1721912151147979152
        
           | maCDzP wrote:
           | I had the exact same problem and just like you I believe it's
           | an important feature.
        
           | spdustin wrote:
           | The citations are built to reference the ID of the quote
           | object in the metadata returned by the `quote_lines`
           | function. I have been able to get them to point elsewhere,
           | but not in the GPT itself; only with a userscript that
           | intercepts the fetch for the completion and re-writes that
           | metadata. Even then, encoding a URL for the real source would
           | require a lookup somewhere to get the original source.
           | 
           | I had a _little_ luck instructing the GPT to perform "an
           | additional step after calling the `quote_lines` function of
           | the `myfiles_browser` tool" so maybe that's worth poking
           | around further.
        
         | Ephil012 wrote:
         | Here's the catch. I did an analysis earlier myself of the
         | assistants API and discovered this good performance is ONLY for
         | if you combine into a single text file. If you try multiple
         | files it fails.
         | 
         | Here's my post with the analysis.
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38280718
        
       | spdustin wrote:
       | Simon, I've got the full Custom GPT Builder prompt here:
       | 
       | https://github.com/spdustin/ChatGPT-AutoExpert/blob/main/_sy...
        
         | fudged71 wrote:
         | ^ Great to see the prompt.
         | 
         | Also thank you for publishing your AutoExpert GPTs they have
         | been really useful.
        
       | marshray wrote:
       | I built a custom GPT[1]. Brief developer experience report:
       | 
       | * Creation process went smoothly.
       | 
       | * The chatbot helper was helpful, but
       | 
       | * it appeared to be the only way to upload a data file with
       | metadata comments,
       | 
       | * leading me to question if the context of my whole chatbot
       | assistant session was part of the resulting GPT or not and, if
       | so, is there any way to manage that state or clear it.
       | 
       | * I set the custom GPT link to 'public' and gave the link out on
       | my social media channels
       | 
       | * No feedback or indication whatsoever that anyone has even
       | looked at it.
       | 
       | * I made a feature request via the feedback form, quickly
       | received back a form email that was almost entirely "try plugging
       | it in again" style troubleshooting steps.
       | 
       | * The existing-subscriber-only restriction is death.
       | 
       | * I am planning my future experiments somewhere else.
       | 
       | [1] "Original Thought" https://chat.openai.com/g/g-Axi7rODxG-
       | original-thought
        
       | etewiah wrote:
       | Am I the only one who thinks GPTS is a terrible name. I see a lot
       | of people struggling with the name and googling for GPTs will
       | always be a bit hit and miss....
       | 
       | I came up with the concept of a gipety (singular) and gipeties
       | (plural) and would be quite chaffed if I could figure a way of
       | making it stick ;)
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | Yeah, it's a terrible name. But ChatGPT is even worse, and 100m
         | people know what that means now.
         | 
         | Leaning into GPTs at this point feels sensible to me. What's
         | ChatGPT? It's the place you go to chat with your GPTs.
        
         | gardenhedge wrote:
         | I don't mind it. Lots of acronyms have been names in the past
         | like AOL and MSN. I speak English though - maybe it's not as
         | good for non-english speakers.
        
       | Ephil012 wrote:
       | I tried out the Assistants API and noticed that similarly bad
       | performance, but with a catch. Apparently if you combine all the
       | files into one single text file, then the performance is amazing.
       | But if it's spread across multiple files the performance is
       | pretty bad.
       | 
       | Analysis here if anyone is curious
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38280718
        
       | digitcatphd wrote:
       | I would say they are a bit more than in a trench coat, as they
       | have the ability to customize via RAG and custom functions. But
       | ultimately yeah, to hell with them. For each GPT they may
       | possibly pay you for, but probably not, would otherwise be a
       | worthy attempt at a side gig at a minimum. I'd rather put
       | something on GitHub than hand it over to them.
        
       | swyx wrote:
       | Simon isnt very impressed by GPTs but we have to remember that
       | Simon amounts to the proest of the pro users - GPTs are meant for
       | the nontechnical crowd for whom even "system instructions" are
       | too hard
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | I'm pretty impressed by them now I've had time to more fully
         | explore them.
        
       | koeng wrote:
       | One thing that I've been doing lately is creating a "synbiogpt",
       | and from it, have come to realize the limitations of the custom
       | GPTs.
       | 
       | - Biological sequence data is usually quite long. This is fine if
       | the biological data is in a file: however, if you need interact
       | with an API for advanced function (like codon optimization), you
       | have to send this across a wire. The API calling context window
       | then gets filled up with sequence data, and fails.
       | 
       | - I can't inject dependencies, many of which I've written myself
       | specifically for biological engineering. Sometimes GPT will then
       | try to code its own implementation, often which is incorrect.
       | 
       | - The retrieval API often fails to open files if GPT-4 thinks it
       | knows what it is talking about. When I'm talking about genetic
       | parts, I often want to be very specific about the particular
       | parts in my library, rather than the parts GPT-4 thinks is out
       | there.
       | 
       | I fixed most of this by just rolling my own lua-scripting
       | environment (my biological functions are in golang, and I run
       | gopher-lua to run the lua environment). I inject example lua for
       | how to use the scripting functions, as well as my (right now,
       | small) genetic part library, and then ask it to generate me lua
       | to do certain operations on the files provided, without GPT-4
       | ever looking at the files. My internal golang app then executed
       | the scripted lua. This works great, and is much faster than a
       | custom GPT.
       | 
       | The biggest problem I have right now is the frontend bits. I
       | would love to have basically an open source ChatGPT looking-clone
       | that I can just pull attachments out of + modify the initial user
       | inputs (to add my lua examples and such). So far I haven't found
       | a good option.
        
       | Biologist123 wrote:
       | I carried out a work training today, giving about 20 project
       | managers from a client company an introduction to a methodology
       | for set up of produce cooperatives within their supply chains.
       | Using template project management documentation which I'd
       | uploaded to a GPT, I could lead the project managers through a
       | questionnaire and then feed their answers as an image to the GPT,
       | and have the GPT spit out the project documentation tailored to
       | the project manager's specifics.
       | 
       | It was sort of awesome. I say sort of because I was able to
       | create 20 documentation sets in a day. But there was still a lot
       | of manual copying and pasting.
       | 
       | Why?
       | 
       | The GPT goes off-piste making its own shit up after about a page
       | or so despite having templates to use, which I had to find a work
       | around for. Easy enough but needed a lot of repeat instructions:
       | "now output page 3 of the concept note" etc.
       | 
       | ChatGPT timed me out about half way through for an hour. That got
       | a bit stressful waiting for access again.
       | 
       | Previously, I'd built some software to do this job, at a cost of
       | about 15k.
        
         | maCDzP wrote:
         | I did something similar. I ran a workshop and uploaded all the
         | post it's for transcription and summarization. It worked great,
         | saved a lot of time.
        
       | mnhcorp wrote:
       | They nailed the UX, again.
       | 
       | At Appstorm (www.appstorm.ai, FD: I'm co-founder) we have been
       | building a Gen AI app builder based on Gradio which, in
       | hindsight, was just a GPT-builder. Based on their dev day
       | announcement we switched to the Assistants API and the latest
       | models and it's been great. It's like we built the poor man's
       | GPT-builder, our beta is even free. We're currently working hard
       | so users can switch to an open-source model config (using Autogen
       | as a replacement for the Assistant API, and replicate for
       | everything else) while being able to download the GPTs (and their
       | source).
       | 
       | It's a shame because I really want to build more GPTs on their
       | platform, but spending all my time building a more open GPT-
       | builder seems like the right choice.
        
       | quickthrower2 wrote:
       | Can (will?) OpenAI include a RAG feature?
       | 
       | (Why am I asking humans lol?)
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | The GPTs "knowledge" feature is exactly that - it's RAG, with
         | the ability to upload documents and have it chunk them, embed
         | them, vector store them and use that to help answer questions.
         | 
         | The problem is it's not very well documented and hard to get
         | good results out of, at least in my experience so far. I'm
         | confident they'll fix that pretty quickly though.
        
         | marvinkennis wrote:
         | They already did
         | https://platform.openai.com/docs/assistants/tools/knowledge-...
        
       | andreyk wrote:
       | "The purely prompt-driven ones are essentially just ChatGPT in a
       | trench coat. They're effectively a way of bookmarking and sharing
       | custom instructions, which is fun and useful but doesn't feel
       | like a revolution in how we build on top of these tools."
       | 
       | This is missing one important aspects of GPTs: fine tuning. As
       | with ChatGPT, the UI allows you to thumbs up / thumbs down
       | replies, which results in data that OpenAI can be used to improve
       | the model. If (and I have no idea if this is the case) OpenAI
       | invests in finetuning individual GPTs on their own distinct
       | datasets, a GPT could diverge from being a "chatgpt in a
       | trenchgoat" pretty significantly with use.
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | I very much doubt that existing GPTs have any fine tuning
         | features at all. If they did then OpenAI would have shouted it
         | from the rooftops.
         | 
         | They might by storing those up/downvotes for some far-future
         | (and likely very expensive) fine-tuned GPT product, but I think
         | it's more likely they just inherited those buttons from
         | existing ChatGPT.
        
           | andreyk wrote:
           | Yeah, that's most likely true. I am less sure this would be a
           | "far future" feature, though, given it's probably not a ton
           | of work and power users would probably be willing to pay for
           | it. We shall see, OpenAI moves fast...
        
       | TheCaptain4815 wrote:
       | Still super disappointed that GPT's can only consist of a single
       | model. When I saw the leaks, I was thinking they're creating an
       | Autogen like framework but with a drag n drop UI. Now something
       | like this would make custom GPTs much much more powerful.
        
         | naiv wrote:
         | This is the first iteration. I am sure many improvements will
         | follow in the next months.
        
       | stockhorn wrote:
       | I would like to see a GPT that has the latest knowledge of the
       | libraries I want to discuss with him.
       | 
       | E.g. if I paste rust code with a serde invocation, the bot should
       | look at doc.rs to find out the correct usage of the library. Or
       | even better: scan the entire github repo, so that it is up2date
       | with the crate.
        
       | iteratethis wrote:
       | It's a clever model from OpenAI.
       | 
       | Developers will be rushing to create GPTs, after which OpenAI
       | will get a huge amount of ideas and creativity for free. And
       | might integrate the top 1% directly into the core engine. Similar
       | to how Apple regularly destroys app developers by adding the
       | features of popular apps into iOS, and how Amazon makes a rip-off
       | product of popular 3rd party sellers.
       | 
       | And, if you upload custom data, I imagine it leaks into the
       | larger model. This way their core engine discovering data it had
       | not seen before. Similar to how we've all voluntarily have given
       | up our data to Google.
       | 
       | And, underlying terms and pricing can change at anytime. And
       | you'll have nowhere else to go as this will be the world's one
       | and only engine.
        
       | smusamashah wrote:
       | I am going to use some of these in my chrome extension[1] as
       | system prompts. The dejargonizer seems like the most obvious use
       | case for me. Atm I mostly use it to explain highlighted word or
       | sentence. But just explain some jargon seems more useful.
       | 
       | https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/LookupChatGPT
        
       | chatmasta wrote:
       | How I learn about new OpenAI features:
       | 
       | 1. Skim headlines on Twitter breathlessly announcing some vaguely
       | named new thing
       | 
       | 2. Be inundated with overwhelming number of Tweets about that
       | thing on my For You page from a bunch of Twitter influencers
       | 
       | 3. Ignore it and wait for simonw to explain it
       | 
       | 4. Read blog post from simonw after he's already trialed the
       | feature in half a dozen different ways and written a clear
       | description and critique of what it is. Everything instantly
       | makes sense.
        
       | throwaw33333434 wrote:
       | Anyone has a way to improve pdf data extraction? I want to covert
       | a table in pdf to a CSV.
       | 
       | so far the best performance has conversation to string
       | 
       | import fitz # PyMuPDF
       | 
       | pdf_document = fitz.open("foo.pdf") page_number = 1 page =
       | pdf_document.load_page(page_number - 1) text =
       | page.get_text("text")
       | 
       | response = client.chat.completions.create( model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
       | messages=[ { "role": "system", "content": f""" ..... {text} ....
       | """
       | 
       | If I try regular ChatGPT it takes 3 minutes to covert the table
       | (I have to press continue). Is there a way to force API to create
       | whole CSV? some sort of retry?
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | I've had really good results from AWS Textract for that.
         | 
         | It's a bit of a pain to get started with, but if you have an
         | AWS account you can find a UI for using it buried deep within
         | the AWS web console.
        
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       (page generated 2023-11-15 23:00 UTC)