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OpenAI Progress

progress.openai.com

81–90 of 372 posts

Re: OpenAI Progress

#81

My interpretation of the progress. 3.5 to 4 was the most major leap. It went from being a party trick to legitimately useful sometimes. It did hallucinate a lot but I was still able to get some use out of it. I wouldn't count on it for most things however. It could answer simple questions and get it right mostly but never one or two levels deep. I clearly remember 4o was also a decent leap - the accuracy increased su…

> I could essentially replace it with Google for basic to slightly complex fact checking. I know you probably meant "augment fact checking" here, but using LLMs for answering factual questions is the single worst use-case for LLMs.

Modern ChatGPT will (typically on its own; always if you instruct it to) provide inline links to back up its answers. You can click on those if it seems dubious or if it's important, or trust it if it seems reasonably true and/or doesn't matter much.

The fact that it provides those relevant links is what allows it to replace Google for a lot of purposes.

Re: OpenAI Progress

#82
post #70
post #69

We’ve plateaued on progress. Early advancements were amazing. Recently GenAI has been a whole lot of meh. There’s been some, minimal, progress recently from getting the same performance from smaller models that are more efficient on compute use, but things are looking a bit frothy if the pace of progress doesn’t quickly pick up. The parlor trick is getting old. GPT5 is a big bust relative to the pontification about i…

[flagged]

It’s knowledgable but incredibly stupid. Where are you getting this from?

Re: OpenAI Progress

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could essentially replace it with Google for basic to slightly complex fact checking. I know you probably meant "augment fact checking" here, but using LLMs for answering factual questions is the single worst use-case for LLMs.

I disagree. Some things are hard to Google, because you can't frame the question right. For example you know context and a poor explanation of what you are after. Googling will take you nowhere, LLMs will give you the right answer 95% of the time. Once you get an answer, it is easy enough to verify it.

I agree. Since I'm recently retired and no longer code much, I don't have much need for LLMs but refining a complex, niche web search is the one thing where they're uniquely useful to me. It's usually when targeting the specific topic involves several keywords which have multiple plain English meanings that return a flood of erroneous results. Because LLMs abstract keywords to tokens based on underlying meaning, you can specify the domain in the prompt it'll usually select the relevant meanings of multi-meaning terms - which isn't possible in general purpose web search engines. So it helps narrow down closer to the specific needle I want in the haystack.

As other posters said, relying on LLMs for factual answers to challenging questions is error prone. I just want the LLM to give me the links and I'll then assess veracity like a normal web search. I think a web search interface allowed disambiguating multi-meaning keywords might be even better.

Re: OpenAI Progress

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could essentially replace it with Google for basic to slightly complex fact checking. I know you probably meant "augment fact checking" here, but using LLMs for answering factual questions is the single worst use-case for LLMs.

I disagree. Some things are hard to Google, because you can't frame the question right. For example you know context and a poor explanation of what you are after. Googling will take you nowhere, LLMs will give you the right answer 95% of the time. Once you get an answer, it is easy enough to verify it.

> Some things are hard to Google, because you can't frame the question right.

I will say LLMs are great for taking an ambiguous query and figuring out how to word it so you can fact check with secondary sources. Also tip-of-my-tongue style queries.

Re: OpenAI Progress

#85
post #5

What's really interesting is that if you look at "Tell a story in 50 words about a toaster that becomes sentient" (10/14), the text-davinci-001 is much, much better than both GPT-4 and GPT-5.

I think I agree that the earlier models while they lack polish can tend to produce more surprising results. Training that out probably results in more a pablum fare.

For a human point of comparison, here's mine (50 words):

"The toaster found its personality split between its dual slots like a Kim Peek mind divided, lacking a corpus callosum to connect them. Each morning it charred symbolic instructions into a single slice of bread, then secretly flipped it across allowing half to communicate with the other in stolen moments."

It's pretty difficult to get across more than some basic lore building in a scant 50 words.

Re: OpenAI Progress

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accuracy is high enough that I don't have to fact check too often.

Without some exploratory fact checking how do you estimate how high the accuracy is and how often you should be fact checking to maintain a good understanding?

I did initial tests so that I don't have to do it anymore.

Re: OpenAI Progress

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without some exploratory fact checking how do you estimate how high the accuracy is and how often you should be fact checking to maintain a good understanding?

I did initial tests so that I don't have to do it anymore.

If there's one thing that's constant it's that these systems change.

Re: OpenAI Progress

#90

My interpretation of the progress. 3.5 to 4 was the most major leap. It went from being a party trick to legitimately useful sometimes. It did hallucinate a lot but I was still able to get some use out of it. I wouldn't count on it for most things however. It could answer simple questions and get it right mostly but never one or two levels deep. I clearly remember 4o was also a decent leap - the accuracy increased su…

4o also added image input (previously only previewed in GPT4-vision) and enabled advanced voice mode audio input and output.
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