OpenAI product head denies GPT-4 got “lazier and dumber”
OpenAI vice president of product Peter Welinder rejected claims GPT-4 became “lazier and dumber.” Online communities r/OpenAI, and r/ChatGPT had many complaints about the chatbot’s reduced performance for several months. In response, Welinder tweeted that new versions are always smarter than previous ones, and frequent users tend to notice more issues.
More people are relying on artificial intelligence tools for daily tasks. Moreover, many have paid a ChatGPT Plus subscription to use the latest ChatGPT AI. As a result, more people expect OpenAI to maintain quality and improve its services further.
Did GPT-4 truly become more complacent than before? Let’s find out by discussing why people made these claims. Later, I will cover the AI company’s explanation for the supposed performance dip.
Why did GPT-4 get “lazier and dumber?”
No, we haven't made GPT-4 dumber. Quite the opposite: we make each new version smarter than the previous one.
Current hypothesis: When you use it more heavily, you start noticing issues you didn't see before.
— Peter Welinder (@npew) July 13, 2023
Insider shared several online rants regarding the negative reception towards GPT-4. The news outlet said many users vented their frustrations on multiple platforms.
They posted complaints on Twitter, OpenAI’s online developer forum, and subreddits r/OpenAI and r/ChatGPT. These were some of their specific problems:
- More erroneous responses
- Losing track of provided information
- Only remember the most recent prompt
- Trouble following instructions
- Forgetting to add brackets in user software code
A developer wrote, “The current GPT-4 is disappointing. It’s like driving Ferrari for a month, then suddenly it turns into a beaten-up old pickup. I’m not sure I want to pay for it.”
Peter Yang, Roblox product lead, tweeted ChatGPT AI model was generating faster outputs but with lower quality. “Just simple questions like making writing more clear and concise and generating ideas.”
“The writing quality has gone down, in my opinion,” he added. Then, Yang asked others if they noticed similar issues. In response, Twitter user Frazier MacLeod stated, “I’ve found it to be lazier.”
Insider also shared Christi Kennedy’s complaint about GPT-4 looping outputs of code and other information repeatedly. She wrote last month, “It’s braindead vs. before.”
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“If you aren’t actually pushing it with what it could do previously, you wouldn’t notice. Yet, if you are really using it fully, you see it is obviously much dumber.”
The CEO of Lamini, a startup that assists developers in building large language models, speculated the reason for the chatbot’s decline. Sharon Zhou and other AI experts said it could be an AI system change.
Specifically, OpenAI may have created smaller GPT-4 models to replace the larger one. She called the approach a “Mixture of Experts” or MOE.
What is MOE?
The smaller expert models specialize in subject areas like physics and chemistry. When ChatGPT receives a query, it matches the request to an expert model.
The chatbot may also merge results from two or more expert models for complex requests. Zhou claimed, “This idea has been around for a while, and it’s a natural next step.”
“OpenAI is taking GPT-4 and turning it into a fleet of smaller ships. From my perspective, it’s a new model. Some would say it’s the same,” the CEO added.
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Allen Institute for AI CEO Oren Etzioni emailed Insider elaborating on this claim. “I would *conjecture* that the speculations are roughly accurate, but I don’t have confirmation,” he said.”
Etzioni believed the MOE method enables the chatbot to provide better-generated responses cheaper and faster. Also, Zhou said GPT-4’s performance issues could be OpenAI testing MOE.
“When users test it, we are going to ask so many different questions. It won’t do as well, but it’s collecting data from us, and it will improve and learn,” the Lamini CEO said.
Conclusion
Many people have been complaining ChatGPT has been lacking performance. In response, OpenAI product head Peter Welinder tweeted its new versions are better than previous ones.
He told Twitter using it more frequently causes people to notice more issues. Moreover, he said, “If you have examples where you believe it’s regressed, please reply to this thread, and we’ll investigate.
Other Ai experts say the decline could be due to OpenAI testing a new system. Nevertheless, know about the latest digital updates at Inquirer Tech.
