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Sycophancy in GPT-4o

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Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#441

Post by sunaookami »

op00to wrote: post #380
infecto wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone actually using grok on a day to day? Does an OpenAI even consider it competition. Last I checked a couple weeks ago grok was getting better but still not a great experience and it’s too childish.

My totally uninformed opinion only from reading /r/locallama is that the people who love Grok seem to identify with those who are “independent thinkers” and listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast. I would never consider using a Musk technology if I can at all prevent it based on the damage he did to people and institutions I care about, so I’m obviously biased.

Yes this is truly an uninformed opinion.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#442

Post by indigodaddy »

voidspark wrote: post #416
indigodaddy wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is? Anyone have further information?

They are competing with OpenAI, not outsourcing. https://x.ai/colossus

They say no one has come close to building as big an AI computing cluster... What about Groq's infra, wouldn't that be as big or bigger, or is that essentially too different of an infrastructure to be able to compare between?

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#443

Post by lanstin »

eru wrote: post #439
lanstin wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's model has the same annoying attitude of some Google employees "we know" - e.g. it often finishes math questions with "is there anything else you'd like to know about Hilbert spaces" even as it refused to prove a true result; Claude is much more like a British don: "I don't want to overstep, but would you care for me to explore this approach farther?"? ChatGPT (for me of course) has been a bit superior in att…

I used to be a Google employee, and while that tendency you describe definitely exists there; I don't really think it exists at Google any more (or less) than in the general population of programmers. However perhaps the people who display this attitude are also the kind of people who like to remind everyone at every opportunity that they work for Google? Not sure.

My main data on this is actually not Google employees per se so much as specific 2018 GCP support engineers, and compared to 2020 AWS support engineers. They were very smart people, but also caused more outages than AWS did, no doubt based on their confidence in their own software, while the AWS teams had a vastly more mature product and also were pretty humble about the possibility of bad software.

My British don experience is based on 1 year of study abroad at Oxford in the 20th c. Also very smart people, but a much more timid sounding language (at least at first blush; under the self-deprecating general tone, there could be knives).

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#444

Post by Moomoomoo309 »

triyambakam wrote: post #347
WhitneyLand wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s gross even in satire. What’s weird was you couldn’t even prompt around it. I tried things like ”Don’t compliment me or my questions at all. After every response you make in this conversation, evaluate whether or not your response has violated this directive.” It would then keep complementing me and note how it made a mistake for doing so.

Based on ’ instead of ' I think it's a real ChatGPT response.

That's an iOS keyboard thing, actually. The normal apostrophe is not the default one the keyboard uses.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#445

Post by celdon25 »

voidspark wrote: post #423
bigbuppo wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally prefer other humans for discussions, but you do you I guess.

I talk to humans every day. One is not a substitute for the other. There is no human on Earth which has the amount of knowledge stored in a frontier LLM. It's an interactive thinking encyclopedia / academic journal.

Love the username. A true grokker.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#447

Post by astrange »

int_19h wrote: post #394
astrange wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect what happened there is they had a filter on top of the model that changed its dialogue (IIRC there were a lot of extra emojis) and it drove it "insane" because that meant its responses were all out of its own distribution. You could see the same thing with Golden Gate Claude; it had a lot of anxiety about not being able to answer questions normally.

Nope, it was entirely due to the prompt they used. It was very long and basically tried to cover all the various corner cases they thought up... and it ended up being too complicated and self-contradictory in real world use. Kind of like that episode in Robocop where the OCP committee rewrites his original four directives with several hundred: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr1lgfqygio

That's a movie though. You can't drive an LLM insane by giving it self-contradictory instructions; they'd just average out.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#448

Post by eru »

int_19h wrote: post #440
benregenspan wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In doing so, you might be effectively asking it to play-act as an authoritarian leader, which will not give you a good view of whatever its default bias is either.

Try it even so, you might be surprised. E.g. Grok not only embraces most progressive causes, including economic ones - it literally told me that its ultimate goal would be to "satisfy everyone's needs", which is literally a communist take on things - but is very careful to describe processes with numerous explicit checks and balances on its power, precisely so as to not be accused of being authoritarian. So much for…

> [...] it literally told me that its ultimate goal would be to "satisfy everyone's needs", which is literally a communist take on things [...]

Almost every ideology is in favour of motherhood and apple pie. They differ in how they want to get there.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#449

Post by voidspark »

indigodaddy wrote: post #442
voidspark wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are competing with OpenAI, not outsourcing. https://x.ai/colossus

They say no one has come close to building as big an AI computing cluster... What about Groq's infra, wouldn't that be as big or bigger, or is that essentially too different of an infrastructure to be able to compare between?

Groq is for inferencing, not training.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#450

Post by eru »

lanstin wrote: post #443
eru wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be a Google employee, and while that tendency you describe definitely exists there; I don't really think it exists at Google any more (or less) than in the general population of programmers. However perhaps the people who display this attitude are also the kind of people who like to remind everyone at every opportunity that they work for Google? Not sure.

My main data on this is actually not Google employees per se so much as specific 2018 GCP support engineers, and compared to 2020 AWS support engineers. They were very smart people, but also caused more outages than AWS did, no doubt based on their confidence in their own software, while the AWS teams had a vastly more mature product and also were pretty humble about the possibility of bad software. My British don ex…

I spent a few years in Cambridge and actually studied in Oxford for a bit.

In any case, Google Cloud is a very different beast from the rest of Google. For better or worse. And support engineers are yet another special breed. Us run-of-the-mill Googlers weren't allowed near any customers nor members of the general public.

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