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Friday Fun Thread for July 14, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I would like a sanity check:

Is ChatGPT4 getting very noticably worse? My impression is that it has gotten much worse since it's release, in most visible areas such as engaging with questions without very elaborate prompting, answering them correctly (again without elaborate prompting), lying about what it knows and doesn't know and how to works, etc.

Questions I would get quick answers to before can barely be answered anymore (not CW stuff). Am I just imagining things or are they RLHFing it into uselessness?

Thanks for the link!

I tend to find myself implementing my Wikipedia ruleset: trustworthy/useful on things that are not remotely political.

I currently use it for cooking recipes. Since most recipe websites are such garbage experiences that I'd rather trust the AI to slap together a recipe. I made a banana cake from an AI recipe.

I also still use chatgpt 3.5 haven't heard a compelling reason to use 4.

The chat also tends to have an annoying tendency to have a 3 paragraph answer minimum.

Does the AI get ingredient proportions right all the time?

Maybe?

Hasn't been horribly wrong yet. My banana cake did come out a bit closer to a banana bread in taste.

Verifying the instructions would require me to go use the horrible recipe sites I avoid.

FWIW, they claim it's the same model. Some people believe it may be difference in sampling strategy – speculative sampling, early exit decoding or some other tactic to cut costs.

How are you guys accessing ChatGPT4 anyways? I've used ChatGPT a couple of times and I was under the impression that GPT4 is only available via the commercial API with significant costs. Are you all paying for it, or is there some other site that lets you use it for free for some limited amount?

My employer has an account with unlimited gpt4 api access. I use the openai playground.

I recommend everyone use that short of making their own custom UI. It's way better than the ChatGPT web app interface.

You can sign up for ChatGPT Plus for $20/month. It comes with limited access to ChatGPT-4 (25 messages every three hours). That's a pretty fair price for having access to the most powerful AI in the world.

I'm not super against paying for it, I'm just a little reluctant to when I don't have any idea what to use it for that's actually useful. I've mostly used ChatGPT for things I might otherwise google for general explanations. It does mostly provide better results than whatever you'd find on Google.

Not if you can get api access

I've paid.

I don't know if ChatGPT 4 is getting worse, but I've been using the base GPT-4 API or thin wrappers over it from the beginning, and can't point to any deterioration myself.

https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-gpt4-ai-model-got-lazier-dumber-chatgpt-2023-7

There's been a lot of anecdotes about it lately. A thread in the orange site as well.

I see. Perhaps it'll get better in the future but the current version seems to have passed an inflection point in performance where it's not worth paying for or even using anymore.

Anecdotally I've seen it stop being able to transform markdown text into hyperlinks for some reason. Haven't used it much otherwise.

I've seen a people who use it saying so on twitter over the last months.

IIRC it was even addressed by OpenAI who said they improved performance because it was too costly.

I think our expectations have gotten so much better that its flaws are more visible. It’s hard to say how much RLHF (by customers, since release) is changing things.

Maybe so, but I've tried asking questions I've asked previously and it takes a lot of effort to make it answer, when it's at all possible, what it previously just answered.