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Sycophancy in GPT-4o

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Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#21
post #4

The sentence that stood out to me was "We’re revising how we collect and incorporate feedback to heavily weight long-term user satisfaction". This is a good change. The software industry needs to pay more attention to long-term value, which is harder to estimate.

That's marketing speak. Any time you adopt a change, whether it's fixing an obvious mistake or a subtle failure case, you credit your users to make them feel special. There are other areas (sama's promised open LLM weights) where this long-term value is outright ignored by OpenAI's leadership for the promise of service revenue in the meantime.

There was likely no change of attitude internally. It takes a lot more than a git revert to prove that you're dedicated to your users, at least in my experience.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#22
I actually liked that version. I have a fairly verbose "personality" configuration and up to this point it seemed that chatgpt mainly incorporated phrasing from it into the answers. With this update, it actually started following it.

For example, I have "be dry and a little cynical" in there and it routinely starts answers with "let's be dry about this" and then gives a generic answer, but the sycophantic chatgpt was just... Dry and a little cynical. I used it to get book recommendations and it actually threw shade at Google. I asked if that was explicit training by Altman and the model made jokes about him as well. It was refreshing.

I'd say that whatever they rolled out was just much much better at following "personality" instructions, and since the default is being a bit of a sycophant... That's what they got.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#23
post #20

I enjoyed this example of sycophancy from Reddit: New ChatGPT just told me my literal "shit on a stick" business idea is genius and I should drop $30K to make it real https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k920cg/new_chatgp... Here's the prompt: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k920cg/comment/mp...

i'm surprised by the lack of sycophancy in o3 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#24

It's worth noting that one of the fixes OpenAI employed to get ChatGPT to stop being sycophantic is to simply to edit the system prompt to include the phrase "avoid ungrounded or sycophantic flattery": https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/29/chatgpt-sycophancy-pro... I personally never use the ChatGPT webapp or any other chatbot webapps — instead using the APIs directly — because being able to control the system prompt…

I also started by using APIs directly, but I've found that Google's AI Studio offers a good mix of the chatbot webapps and system prompt tweakability.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#25
post #4

The sentence that stood out to me was "We’re revising how we collect and incorporate feedback to heavily weight long-term user satisfaction". This is a good change. The software industry needs to pay more attention to long-term value, which is harder to estimate.

The software industry does pay attention to long-term value extraction. That’s exactly the problem that has given us things like Facebook

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#26
post #20

I enjoyed this example of sycophancy from Reddit: New ChatGPT just told me my literal "shit on a stick" business idea is genius and I should drop $30K to make it real https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k920cg/new_chatgp... Here's the prompt: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k920cg/comment/mp...

i'm surprised by the lack of sycophancy in o3 https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

[deleted]

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#28
post #2

Looks like a complete stunt to prop up attention.

AI's aren't controllable so they wouldn't stake their reputation on it acting a certain way. It's comparable to the conspiracy theory that the Trump assassination attempt was staged. People don't bet the farm on tools or people that are unreliable.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#29
post #4

The sentence that stood out to me was "We’re revising how we collect and incorporate feedback to heavily weight long-term user satisfaction". This is a good change. The software industry needs to pay more attention to long-term value, which is harder to estimate.

The software industry does pay attention to long-term value extraction. That’s exactly the problem that has given us things like Facebook

I wager that Facebook did precisely the opposite, eking out short-term engagement at the expense of hollowing out their long-term value.

They do model the LTV now but the product was cooked long ago: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1730784113851988

Or maybe you meant vendor lock in?

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