If I wanted sycophancy, I would just read the comments from people that want in on the next round of YCombinator funding.
Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy
61–70 of 297 posts
Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Underestimating the complexity of other fields is not mutually exclusive with overestimating the intelligence of others. The real issue is that society is very stratified so smart people are less likely to interact with regular people, especially in circumstances where the intelligence of the regular person could become obvious. I don’t see there being an insurmountable barrier that would prevent LLMs from doing the…
Do you presume that "what people do" is "what they should do"?
If you are suggesting that people shouldn't underestimate the difficulty of the jobs of others - my answer is a strong yes. People should strive for accuracy in all cases. But I did suggest that even if true it does not negate my assertion so I am failing to see the relevance. Perhaps I have misunderstood your point.
Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy
#63I 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…
For many people ChatGPT is already the smartest relationship they have in their lives, not sure how long we have until it’s the most fulfilling. On the upside it is plausible that ChatGPT can get to a state where it can act as a good therapist and help helpless who otherwise would not get help. I am more regularly finding myself in discussions where the other person believes they’re right because they have ChatGPT in…
For a subset of topics, "AI" is already what I prefer to interact with over humans. At times, it's nicer to start with "AI" and kind of ground my messy thoughts before interacting with people and that works better than directly starting with a person.
I'm also starting to come across people who say "You should ask these types of questions to AI first" answer. But this is no different than people who preached "lmfgt" kind of religiously. Even when I prefer to start with humans, some humans prompt me to start by prompting AI.
Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
For many people ChatGPT is already the smartest relationship they have in their lives, not sure how long we have until it’s the most fulfilling. On the upside it is plausible that ChatGPT can get to a state where it can act as a good therapist and help helpless who otherwise would not get help. I am more regularly finding myself in discussions where the other person believes they’re right because they have ChatGPT in…
For a subset of topics, "AI" is already what I prefer to interact with over humans. At times, it's nicer to start with "AI" and kind of ground my messy thoughts before interacting with people and that works better than directly starting with a person. I'm also starting to come across people who say "You should ask these types of questions to AI first" answer. But this is no different than people who preached "lmfgt"…
I see the same.
I'm waiting on LLMs to get good enough that I can use them to help me learn foreign languages - e.g. talk to me about the news in language X. This way I can learn a language in an interesting and interactive way without burdening some poor human with my mistakes. I would build this myself but others will probably beat me too it.
Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
For many people ChatGPT is already the smartest relationship they have in their lives, not sure how long we have until it’s the most fulfilling. On the upside it is plausible that ChatGPT can get to a state where it can act as a good therapist and help helpless who otherwise would not get help. I am more regularly finding myself in discussions where the other person believes they’re right because they have ChatGPT in…
I think that most smart people underestimate the complexity of fields they aren’t in. ChatGPT may be able to replace a psychology listicle, but it has no affect or ability to read, respond, and intervene or redirect like a human can.
You’re comparing ChatGPT to an idealized example of a good human therapist when many actual therapists are either useless or even actively harmful to the mental health of their clients.
Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy
#66I 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…
> I think the broader issue here is people using ChatGPT as their own personal therapist.
It's easy to blame the user - we can think of some trivial cases where we wouldn't blame the user at all.*
In this, like all things, context is king.
* one example passed around a lot was an interlocutor who is hearing voices, and left their family for torturing them with the voices. More figuratively, if that's too concrete and/or fake, we can think of some age group < N years old that we would be sympathetic to if they got bad advice
Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy
#67I 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…
> I think the broader issue here is people using ChatGPT as their own personal therapist.
An aside, but:
This leads me right to “why do so very many people need therapy?” followed by “why can’t anyone find (or possibly afford) a therapist?” What has gone so wrong for humanity that nearly everyone seems to at least want a therapist? Or is it just the zeitgeist and this is what the herd has decided?
Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't like the change either. At the least it should be an option you can configure. But, can you use a "temporary" chat to ignore your other chats as a workaround?
I had a discussion with GPT 4o about the memory system. I'd don't know if any of this is made up but it's a start for further research - Memory in settings is configurable. It is visible and can be edited. - Memory from global chat history is not configurable. Think of it as a system cache. - Both memory systems can be turned off - Chats in Projects do not use the global chat history. They are isolated. - Chats in Pr…
I assume this is being downvoted because I said I ran it by GPT 4o.
I don't know how to credit AI without giving the impression that I'm outsourcing my thinking to it
Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy
#69My 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…
Maybe o3 is better on whatever the current benchmark vogue is, but in real world use I keep switching back to 4o. It hallucinates less, is more accurate and way more coherent.
Re: Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a subset of topics, "AI" is already what I prefer to interact with over humans. At times, it's nicer to start with "AI" and kind of ground my messy thoughts before interacting with people and that works better than directly starting with a person. I'm also starting to come across people who say "You should ask these types of questions to AI first" answer. But this is no different than people who preached "lmfgt"…
I see the same. I'm waiting on LLMs to get good enough that I can use them to help me learn foreign languages - e.g. talk to me about the news in language X. This way I can learn a language in an interesting and interactive way without burdening some poor human with my mistakes. I would build this myself but others will probably beat me too it.
I sometimes prompt the LLM to talk to me as a instructor - to suggest a topic, ask a question, read my response, correct my grammar, and suggest alternate vocabulary where appropriate. This works quite well. Similar to your comment, I am often hesitant to butcher a language in front of a real person :-).