Simon Willison’s Weblog

When I speak in front of groups and ask them to raise their hands if they used the free version of ChatGPT, almost every hand goes up. When I ask the same group how many use GPT-4, almost no one raises their hand. I increasingly think the decision of OpenAI to make the “bad” AI free is causing people to miss why AI seems like such a huge deal to a minority of people that use advanced systems and elicits a shrug from everyone else.

— Ethan Mollick # 10th December 2023, 8:17 pm

The company pressed forward and launched ChatGPT on November 30. It was such a low-key event that many employees who weren’t directly involved, including those in safety functions, didn’t even realize it had happened. Some of those who were aware, according to one employee, had started a betting pool, wagering how many people might use the tool during its first week. The highest guess was 100,000 users. OpenAI’s president tweeted that the tool hit 1 million within the first five days. The phrase low-key research preview became an instant meme within OpenAI; employees turned it into laptop stickers.

— Inside the Chaos at OpenAI # 20th November 2023, 4:38 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

Since November, OpenAI has already updated ChatGPT several times. The researchers are using a technique called adversarial training to stop ChatGPT from letting users trick it into behaving badly (known as jailbreaking). This work pits multiple chatbots against each other: one chatbot plays the adversary and attacks another chatbot by generating text to force it to buck its usual constraints and produce unwanted responses. Successful attacks are added to ChatGPT’s training data in the hope that it learns to ignore them.

— The inside story of how ChatGPT was built # 5th March 2023, 10:04 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