Simon Willison’s Weblog

gpt-4-turbo over the API produces (statistically significant) shorter completions when it “thinks” its December vs. when it thinks its May (as determined by the date in the system prompt).

I took the same exact prompt over the API (a code completion task asking to implement a machine learning task without libraries).

I created two system prompts, one that told the API it was May and another that it was December and then compared the distributions.

For the May system prompt, mean = 4298
For the December system prompt, mean = 4086

N = 477 completions in each sample from May and December

t-test p < 2.28e-07

— Rob Lynch # 11th December 2023, 7:45 pm

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

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

GPT-4, like GPT-3 before it, has a capability overhang; at the time of release, neither OpenAI or its various deployment partners have a clue as to the true extent of GPT-4’s capability surface—that’s something that we’ll get to collectively discover in the coming years. This also means we don’t know the full extent of plausible misuses or harms.

— Jack Clark # 22nd March 2023, 12:40 am

As an NLP researcher I’m kind of worried about this field after 10-20 years. Feels like these oversized LLMs are going to eat up this field and I’m sitting in my chair thinking, “What’s the point of my research when GPT-4 can do it better?”

— Jeonghwan Kim # 16th March 2023, 5:39 am

I expect GPT-4 will have a LOT of applications in web scraping

The increased 32,000 token limit will be large enough to send it the full DOM of most pages, serialized to HTML—then ask questions to extract data

Or... take a screenshot and use the GPT4 image input mode to ask questions about the visually rendered page instead!

Might need to dust off all of those old semantic web dreams, because the world’s information is rapidly becoming fully machine readable

— Me # 16th March 2023, 1:09 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