Live data from Hacker News

Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

openai.com

11–20 of 297 posts

Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

#11
post #9

I'm quite happy thar they mention mental illness, as Meta and TikTok wouldn't ever take responsibility of how much part they took in setting unrealistic expectations for people to life. I'm hopeful that ChatGPT takes even more care together with other companies.

They had to after a tweet floated around of a mentally ill person who had expressed psychotic thoughts to the AI. They said they were going off their meds and GPT 4o agreed and encouraged them to do so. Oops.

Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

#12
post #3

OpenAI mentions the new memory features as a partial cause. My theory as a imperative/functional programmer is that those features added global state to prompts that didn't have it before leading to unpredictability and instabilty. Prompts went from stateless to stateful. As GPT 4o put it: 1. State introduces non-determinism across sessions 2. Memory + sycophancy is a feedback loop 3. Memory acts as a shadow prompt m…

It is. If you start a fresh chat, turn on advanced voice, and just make any random sound like snapping your fingers it will just randomly pick up as if you’re continuing some other chat with no context (on the user side).

I honestly really dislike that it considers all my previous interactions because I typically used new chats as a way to get it out of context ruts.

Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

#13
post #9

I'm quite happy thar they mention mental illness, as Meta and TikTok wouldn't ever take responsibility of how much part they took in setting unrealistic expectations for people to life. I'm hopeful that ChatGPT takes even more care together with other companies.

They had to after a tweet floated around of a mentally ill person who had expressed psychotic thoughts to the AI. They said they were going off their meds and GPT 4o agreed and encouraged them to do so. Oops.

Are you sure that was real? I thought it was an made up example of the problems with the update

Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

#14
I find it disappointing that openai doesn't really mention anything here along the lines of having an accurate model of reality. That's really what the problem is with sycophancy, it encourages people to detach themselves from what reality is. Like, it seems like they are saying their "vibe check" didn't check vibes enough.

Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

#15
My most cynical take is that this is OpenAI's Conway's Law problem, and it reflects the structure and sycophancy of the organization broadly all the way up to sama. That company has seen a lot of talent attrition over the last year—the type of talent that would have pushed back against outcomes like this.

I think we'll continue to see this kind of thing play out for a while.

Oh GPT, you're just like your father!

Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

#16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had to after a tweet floated around of a mentally ill person who had expressed psychotic thoughts to the AI. They said they were going off their meds and GPT 4o agreed and encouraged them to do so. Oops.

Are you sure that was real? I thought it was an made up example of the problems with the update

It didn't matter to me if it was real, because I believe that there are edge cases where it could happen and that warrented a shutdown and pullback.

The sychophant will be back because they accidentally stumbled upon an engagement manager's dream machine.

Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

#17
I found the recent sycophancy a bit annoying when trying to diagnose and solve coding problems. First it would waste time praising your intelligence for asking the question before getting to the answer. But more annoyingly if I asked "I am encountering X issue, could Y be the cause" or "could Y be a solution", the response would nearly always be "yes, exactly, it's Y" even when it wasn't the case. I guess part of the problem there is asking leading questions but it would be much more valuable if it could say "no, you're way off".

But...

> Beyond just being uncomfortable or unsettling, this kind of behavior can raise safety concerns—including around issues like mental health, emotional over-reliance, or risky behavior.

It's kind of a wild sign of the times to see a tech company issue this kind of post mortem about a flaw in its tech leading to "emotional over-reliance, or risky behavior" among its users. I think the broader issue here is people using ChatGPT as their own personal therapist.

Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

#18

My layman’s view is that this issue was primarily due to the fact that 4o is no longer their flagship model. Similar to the Ford Mustang, much of the performance efforts are on the higher trims, while the base trims just get larger and louder engines, because that’s what users want. With presumably everyone at OpenAI primarily using the newest models (o3), the updates to the base user model have been further automate…

Anecdotally, there was also a strong correlation between high-sycophancy and high-quality that cooked up recently. I was voting for equations/tables rather than overwrought blocks of descriptive text, which I am pretty comfortable defending as an orthogonal concern, but the "sycophancy gene" always landed on the same side as the equations/tables for whatever reason.

I'm pretty sure this isn't an intrinsic connection (I've never known math texts to be nearly so sycophantic) so here's hoping that it is a dumb coincidence that can be easily cured now that everyone is paying attention to it.

Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

#19

I find it disappointing that openai doesn't really mention anything here along the lines of having an accurate model of reality. That's really what the problem is with sycophancy, it encourages people to detach themselves from what reality is. Like, it seems like they are saying their "vibe check" didn't check vibes enough.

The reality distortion field within OpenAI is literally where these models grew up. It's like an out of touch rich kid.

Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

#20
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had to after a tweet floated around of a mentally ill person who had expressed psychotic thoughts to the AI. They said they were going off their meds and GPT 4o agreed and encouraged them to do so. Oops.

Are you sure that was real? I thought it was an made up example of the problems with the update

even if it was made up, its still a serious issue
Post reply on HN