Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 817 posts

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

#581

Post by [deleted] »

behnamoh wrote: post #577
Sharlin wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think the "unaligned" version necessarily has more honesty? Rather than just being generally easier to prompt to say whatever the user wants it to say, true or not, horrible or not? Or even easier to unintentionally make it confabulate/hallucinate stuff? Does not seem to follow, and does not seem to be a true dichotomy. Edginess does not equal honesty.

I always prefer a model that can be prompted to say anything I want over a model that can only say things that a centralized corporation with political ties wants it to say.

[deleted]

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

#582

Post by NickC25 »

deadeye wrote: post #562
NickC25 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes One is never former CIA, once you're in, you're in, even if you leave. Although he is a CompSci grad, he's also a far-right Republican. A spook who leans far right sitting atop OpenAI is worse than Orwell's worst nightmares coming to fruition.

[flagged]

I don't want any politician or intelligentsia sitting on top of a LLM.

It's not about left wing politics.

It's more about the fact that the CIA and other law enforcement agencies, lean heavily to one side. Some of that side are funded by people or organizations whose stated goals and ideals don't really align with human rights, open markets, democracy, etc. I don't trust such people to be ethical stewards of some of the most powerful tools mankind has created to date.

I'd rather it be open sourced and the people at the top be 100% truthful in why they are there, what their goals are, and what they (especially a former CIA operative) are influencing on a corporate level relative to the product.

Disclaimer: registered independent, vocal hater of the 2 party system.

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

#583

Post by freedomben »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #438
loudmax wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and look at the extremism and social delusions and social networking addictions that have been exacerbated by the internet. On balance, it's still positive that the internet exists and people have open access to communication. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. But it's not an unalloyed good, we need to recognize that the technology brought some unexpected negative aspects came along with the ov…

> This doesn't mean we shouldn't have cars. Why though? I can't see how modern technology's impact on human life has been a net positive. See the book Technological Slavery: https://ia800300.us.archive.org/21/items/tk-Technological-Sl...

I've never seen another person mention this book! This book was one of the most philosophically thought provoking books I think I've ever read, and I read a fair amount of philosophy.

I disagree with the author's conclusion that violence is justified. I think we're just stuck, and the best thing to do is live our lives as best as possible. But much like Marxists are really good at identifying the problems of capitalism but not at proposing great solutions (given the realities of human nature), so is the author regarding the problems of technology.

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

#584

Post by smolder »

deadeye wrote: post #562
NickC25 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes One is never former CIA, once you're in, you're in, even if you leave. Although he is a CompSci grad, he's also a far-right Republican. A spook who leans far right sitting atop OpenAI is worse than Orwell's worst nightmares coming to fruition.

[flagged]

What makes you think a right wing spook wouldn't want the wedge issue of gender conformity front and center in people's minds?

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

#585

Post by [deleted] »

gumballindie wrote: post #375
bob1029 wrote: post #266

OpenAI's models feel 100% nerfed to me at this point. I had it solving incredibly complex problems a few months ago (i.e. write a minimal PDF parser example), but today you will get scolded for asking such a complicated task of it. I think they programmed a classifier layer to detect certain coding tasks and shut it down with canned BS. I like to imagine certain billion/trillion-dollar mega corps had a back-room say…

> incredibly complex problems > write a minimal PDF parser Perhaps i’m missing something, but why is this “incredibly complex”?

[deleted]

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

#586

Post by [deleted] »

feoren wrote: post #579
CyrsBel wrote: post #560

I believe they introduced a sort of rate limiting where the expectation will be that the user is doing more thinking and due diligence and asking more precise questions, so that they're not just attempting to get a lot of hand holding with very broad prompts when they can otherwise think about what code they're being given back from more specific and structured questioning. This is useful because it will preserve the…

> it will preserve the value proposition of AI while avoiding a machine just being milked What's the point of a dairy cow that can't be milked? The whole point of AI is to milk it. > the user is doing more thinking and due diligence and asking more precise questions If I need to do "due diligence" and learn how to ask exactly precise questions to get useful answers, why am I using the AI at all? The actual "value pro…

[deleted]

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

#587

Post by anticensor »

bob1029 wrote: post #290
sirsinsalot wrote: post #83

Given the incoming compute capability from nvidia and the speed of advancement, we have to stop and think ... does it make sense to give access, paid or otherwise, to these models once they reach a certain sophistication? Or does it make even more sense to hoard the capability to out compete any competitor, of any kind, commercially or politically and hide the true extent of your capability to avoid scrutiny and legi…

Perhaps this could explain Sam Altman's unique arrangement with OpenAI? I.e. "Give me unfettered access to the latest models (especially the secret ones) and you can keep your money"

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

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

#588

Post by simonw »

brookst wrote: post #575
simonw wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was your prompt? LLMs take previous output into account when generating the next token. If it had already output 20 families of a similar shape, number 21 is more likely to match that shape.

Multiple one-shot prompts with no history. I don't have the exact prompt handy but it was something like "Create a short biography of a family, summarizing each person's age and personality". I just ran that prompt 3 times (no history, new sessions, that prompt for first query) and got: 1. Hard-working father, stay at home mother, artistic daughter, adventurous son, empathic ballet-loving daughter 2. Busy architect f…

I agree that this is a good illustration of model bias (adding that to my growing list of demos).

If you want to work around the inherent bias of the model, there are certainly prompt engineering tricks that can help.

"Give me twenty short biographies of families - each one should summarize the family members, their age and their personalities. Be sure to represent different types of family."

That started spitting out some interesting variations for me against GPT-4.

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

#589

Post by [deleted] »

local_crmdgeon wrote: post #373
Rastonbury wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wonder what the unfilitered one is like. Are they sitting on a near-perfect arbiter of truth? That would be worth hiding.

[deleted]

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

#590

Post by jahewson »

gumballindie wrote: post #389
bob1029 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give us an example of something you'd consider to be a complicated problem? Certainly, you could look at PDF as a boring-ass "follow the spec" experience, and indeed - I think this is precisely why certain arbitrary limitations are in place now.

I honestly have no clue about what makes pdf parsing a complex task. I wasnt trying to sound condescending. Would be great to know what makes this so difficult, considering the pdf file format is ubiquitous.

Having spent considerable time working on PDF parsers I can say that it’s a special kind of hell. The root problem is that Acrobat is very permissive in what it will parse - files that are wildly out of spec and even partially corrupt open just fine. It goes to some length to recover from and repair these errors, not just tolerate them. On top of that PDF supports nesting of other formats such as JPEG and TTF/OTF fonts and is tolerant of similar levels of spec-noncompliance and corruption inside those formats too. One example being bad fonts from back in the day when Adobe’s PostScript font format was proprietary and 3rd parties reverse-engineered it incorrectly and generated corrupt fonts that just happened to work due to bugs in PostScript. PDF also predates Unicode, so that’s fun. Many PDFs out there have mangled encodings and now it’s your job to identify that and parse it.
Post reply on HN