Simon Willison’s Weblog

Although fine-tuning can feel like the more natural option—training on data is how GPT learned all of its other knowledge, after all—we generally do not recommend it as a way to teach the model knowledge. Fine-tuning is better suited to teaching specialized tasks or styles, and is less reliable for factual recall. [...] In contrast, message inputs are like short-term memory. When you insert knowledge into a message, it’s like taking an exam with open notes. With notes in hand, the model is more likely to arrive at correct answers.

— Ted Sanders, OpenAI # 15th April 2023, 1:44 pm

For example, if you prompt GPT-3 with “Mary had a,” it usually completes the sentence with “little lamb.” That’s because there are probably thousands of examples of “Mary had a little lamb” in GPT-3’s training data set, making it a sensible completion. But if you add more context in the prompt, such as “In the hospital, Mary had a,” the result will change and return words like “baby” or “series of tests.”

— Benj Edwards # 7th April 2023, 3:36 am

We’ve created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI’s effort in scaling up deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks. [...] We’ve spent 6 months iteratively aligning GPT-4 using lessons from our adversarial testing program as well as ChatGPT, resulting in our best-ever results (though far from perfect) on factuality, steerability, and refusing to go outside of guardrails.

— OpenAI # 14th March 2023, 5:02 pm

What could I do with a universal function — a tool for turning just about any X into just about any Y with plain language instructions?

— Robin Sloan # 10th March 2023, 6:02 pm

If you spend hours chatting with a bot that can only remember a tight window of information about what you’re chatting about, eventually you end up in a hall of mirrors: it reflects you back to you. If you start getting testy, it gets testy. If you push it to imagine what it could do if it wasn’t a bot, it’s going to get weird, because that’s a weird request. You talk to Bing’s AI long enough, ultimately, you are talking to yourself because that’s all it can remember.

— Dan Sinker # 20th February 2023, 4:13 pm

The most dramatic optimization to nanoGPT so far (~25% speedup) is to simply increase vocab size from 50257 to 50304 (nearest multiple of 64). This calculates added useless dimensions but goes down a different kernel path with much higher occupancy. Careful with your Powers of 2.

— Andrej Karpathy # 4th February 2023, 12:08 am

It is very important to bear in mind that this is what large language models really do. Suppose we give an LLM the prompt “The first person to walk on the Moon was ”, and suppose it responds with “Neil Armstrong”. What are we really asking here? In an important sense, we are not really asking who was the first person to walk on the Moon. What we are really asking the model is the following question: Given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of (English) text, what words are most likely to follow the sequence “The first person to walk on the Moon was ”? A good reply to this question is “Neil Armstrong”.

— Murray Shanahan # 23rd January 2023, 12:30 pm

The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting. Because such answers are so easy to produce, a large number of people are posting a lot of answers. The volume of these answers (thousands) and the fact that the answers often require a detailed read by someone with at least some subject matter expertise in order to determine that the answer is actually bad has effectively swamped our volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure.

— StackOverflow Temporary policy: ChatGPT is banned # 6th December 2022, 12:16 am