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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30382 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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You really need a bit of familiarity and prompt wrangling skill to get the most out of GPT. I've seen plenty of people testing it and fucking up basic stuff which makes them conclude that it's overhyped.

A common issue is not pressing the "GPT-4" button in the ChatGPT interface, and getting GPT-3.5 when you think you're running 4; and not being familiar enough with the interface to recognize that the blue-green icon means it's a lot dumber. E.g. Bryan Caplan fell for that.

A second issue is that GPT is at it's core a predictor, not a simulator. If you ask it something and it messes up the response, asking it something else in the same chat context means it will now start predicting that it's a character that makes mistakes. Resetting the chat fixes that. In the same vein, if you are giving it a quiz, having it predict a student response is suboptimal. Students make mistakes, you want it to predict the answer key.

Also, giving it few-shot examples improves it a great deal. If you have an example of a perfect query+response to a similar question, stuff it in the prompt itself! Then the LLM will know what kind of response you are looking for.

A common issue is not pressing the "GPT-4" button in the ChatGPT interface, and getting GPT-3.5 when you think you're running 4; and not being familiar enough with the interface to recognize that the blue-green icon means it's a lot dumber. E.g. Bryan Caplan fell for that.

Which blue-green icon are you referring to?

In the corner of the ChatGPT replies there's a little profile picture; if it's a blueish-green it's running a 3.X model; black means it's 4.

You might need to click on the image on the Caplan Twitter post to view the entire thing, it gets cut off in the preview window for me.

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