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How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?

arxiv.org

31–40 of 187 posts

Re: How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?

#31
This paper is being misinterpreted. The degradations reported are somewhat peculiar to the authors' task selection and evaluation method and can easily result from fine tuning rather than intentionally degrading GPT-4's performance for cost saving reasons.

They report 2 degradations: code generation & math problems. In both cases, they report a behavior change (likely fine tuning) rather than a capability decrease (possibly intentional degradation). The paper confuses these a bit: they mostly say behavior, including in the title, but the intro says capability in a couple of places.

Code generation: the change they report is that the newer GPT-4 adds non-code text to its output. They don't evaluate the correctness of the code. They merely check if the code is directly executable. So the newer model's attempt to be more helpful counted against it.

Math problems (primality checking): to solve this the model needs to do chain of thought. For some weird reason, the newer model doesn't seem to do so when asked to think step by step (but the current ChatGPT-4 does, as you can easily check). The paper doesn't say that the accuracy is worse conditional on doing CoT.

The other two tasks are visual reasoning and answering sensitive questions. On the former, they report a slight improvement. On the latter, they report that the filters are much more effective — unsurprising since we know that OpenAI has been heavily tweaking these.

In short, everything in the paper is consistent with fine tuning. It is possible that OpenAI is gaslighting everyone by denying that they degraded performance for cost saving purposes — but if so, this paper doesn't provide evidence of it. Still, it's a fascinating study of the unintended consequences of model updates.

Re: How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?

#32
post #17

Previous commentary I know of from OpenAI staff: Logan: The API does not just change without us telling you. The models are static there. https://twitter.com/OfficialLoganK/status/166393494793189785... may 31 Peter: No, we haven't made GPT-4 dumber. Quite the opposite: we make each new version smarter than the previous one. https://twitter.com/jlowin/status/1679660938415177731 july 14 either the models are static, or…

Not really. They have a way of squaring this circle, by changing their inference code. Speculative sampling [1] would still make their first claim a lie – sure, there'd still be the original GPT-4 model, plus a smaller draft worker. But early exit decoding [2] allows you to get almost as good results for much cheaper from exactly the same checkpoint. We know that this line of research for large-scale inference is goi…

I don't get why you're jumping to cloak and daggers style operations: OpenAI would not kneecap their commercial offering by randomly changing how it works.

At the end of the day 99% of the confusion comes from people using the web interface, which undoubtedly does change much more often than the API versions they share.

The web app they host isn't a simple API wrapper, it does summarization, has some sort of system prompt, and calls the moderation API. That's undoubtedly being updated all the time.

Re: How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the methodology listed in the paper shows their efforts were significantly more extensive than you represent here. As one example, their test of prime numbers went through 500 randomly selected primes, also evaluating the chain of thought in responses along with the success rate of this classification task. I’m not sure how you arrived at your impression, but it does not match the contents of the paper that I saw…

Not to seem sarcastic, but 500 randomly selected primes doesn't change my mind. I read the paper, and dumbed it down to dogs and cats. Do you really feel like the efforts were significant or meaningful?

>I read the paper, and dumbed it down to dogs and cats.

I could read the Pricicipia, or anything, and dumb it down to dogs and cats, but that reduction to the dumb would be a failing all my own.

As for the test-- a classification task benchmarked with 500 examples is a fairly decent test of a system's capabilities, be it LLM or a traditional machine learning model. And again, this was only one of a variety of tasks. While it's certainly no Principia, I don't know how you get from there to dogs and cats, nor have you explained your reasoning on how you found the path between the two.

Re: How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. They have a way of squaring this circle, by changing their inference code. Speculative sampling [1] would still make their first claim a lie – sure, there'd still be the original GPT-4 model, plus a smaller draft worker. But early exit decoding [2] allows you to get almost as good results for much cheaper from exactly the same checkpoint. We know that this line of research for large-scale inference is goi…

I don't get why you're jumping to cloak and daggers style operations: OpenAI would not kneecap their commercial offering by randomly changing how it works. At the end of the day 99% of the confusion comes from people using the web interface, which undoubtedly does change much more often than the API versions they share. The web app they host isn't a simple API wrapper, it does summarization, has some sort of system p…

> OpenAI would not kneecap their commercial offering by randomly changing how it works.

> As of July 3, 2023, we’ve disabled the Browse with Bing beta feature out of an abundance of caution while we fix this in order to do right by content owners. We are working to bring the beta back as quickly as possible, and appreciate your understanding!

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8077698-how-do-i-use-cha...

Re: How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest enshittification is good but rare. Like a cloud telling you what specific CPU SKU is in the hardware (not just 1 vcore). They should say what you are paying for in terms of technicals, either spill the beans on the architecture or have some SLAs on how good the thing is.

I work in cloud-land, the problem with exposing every little technical detail is that 1. part of the point of purchasing a cloud product is to abstract that away 2. coding to the implementation instead of the API creates huge headaches for everybody because there are often good reasons (make things more efficient) to change the implementation 3. sadly, there are “features” such as overcommit which you don’t want to k…

That is fine, then you need some kinds of comparable metric that stays the same over time. FLOPS maybe?

Ideally the same across clouds, or more likely cloud-specific.

Or even re pin it every 5 years. E.g. a 2020-CPU, 2025-CPU etc.

We need a "horse power" for the cloud I guess!

Re: How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?

#36
post #7

OpenAI is going to be left in the dust by (actual) open models. Llama 2 is already reaching GPT-3 levels, and can run inference on consumer hardware. Crazy how fast that flipped.

Llama really isn't open source, at least not in the sense of FOSS licenses like GPL or MIT. It comes with a number of use-case conditions and gives Meta many avenues to revoke a license if they feel like it. They also have a hard cap on the number of allowed users you may have using your Llama-based product above which you must seek further Meta approval. Furthermore, Llama remains well below GPT-3 on human rated tes…

> and $10,000+ of compute hardware per inference session.

What hardware would you need to run it at home?

Re: How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?

#37
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What enables this? There's a huge gap between GPT-3.5 and 4, put there by a massive amount of money, from my understanding. To compete, with open source projects being less well funded, I would assume that orders of magnitude improvements in training cost would be required. What do you see driving this, and who do you see paying for it? If Meta, or anyone else, gets something that beats GPT-4, I would naively assume…

>Or, are you suggesting that GPT-4 is the pinnacle of OpenAI, or that their funding will run dry? My bet is that Meta has pivoted almost entirely to this space with their R&D in the last six months. Llama 2 is spectacular. And with its' success, there will undoubtedly be more. They also happen to have access to limitless amounts of compute, cash, and engineering that puts OpenAI to shame. This could finally be their…

What motive do you see for them releasing these models for free, especially with the massive increase in cost associated with catching up?

Re: How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?

#38
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why you're jumping to cloak and daggers style operations: OpenAI would not kneecap their commercial offering by randomly changing how it works. At the end of the day 99% of the confusion comes from people using the web interface, which undoubtedly does change much more often than the API versions they share. The web app they host isn't a simple API wrapper, it does summarization, has some sort of system p…

> OpenAI would not kneecap their commercial offering by randomly changing how it works. > As of July 3, 2023, we’ve disabled the Browse with Bing beta feature out of an abundance of caution while we fix this in order to do right by content owners. We are working to bring the beta back as quickly as possible, and appreciate your understanding! https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8077698-how-do-i-use-cha...

Thank you for confirming my point?

> At the end of the day 99% of the confusion comes from people using the web interface, which undoubtedly does change much more often than the API versions they share.

The API does not offer any browsing features, that's the web app.

Re: How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?

#39
post #13

I tried the prime number problem and GPT-4 nailed it. I’m not sure whether they are testing things correctly… “ Sure, let's go step by step. A prime number is a number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. This means if we can find any other number (excluding 1 and the number itself) that divides 17077, then it is not a prime number. Let's start by checking divisibility by 2. Since 170…

> GPT-4 nailed it Did it? Did you read what it wrote?

I’ve seen so many of these on Twitter since chat GPT came out.

> Look at this amazing capability, it gets it perfectly! (screenshot of interaction with clear flaws/outright wrong answer)

Re: How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?

#40
post #13

I tried the prime number problem and GPT-4 nailed it. I’m not sure whether they are testing things correctly… “ Sure, let's go step by step. A prime number is a number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. This means if we can find any other number (excluding 1 and the number itself) that divides 17077, then it is not a prime number. Let's start by checking divisibility by 2. Since 170…

Aren't there more potential primes between 130 and 7?
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