this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Over just a few months, ChatGPT went from correctly answering a simple math problem 98% of the time to just 2%, study finds. Researchers found wild fluctuations—called drift—in the technology’s abi...::ChatGPT went from answering a simple math correctly 98% of the time to just 2%, over the course of a few months.

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[–] DominicHillsun@lemmy.world 194 points 2 years ago (22 children)

It seems rather suspicious how much ChatGPT has deteorated. Like with all software, they can roll back the previous, better versions of it, right? Here is my list of what I personally think is happening:

  1. They are doing it on purpose to maximise profits from upcoming releases of ChatGPT.
  2. They realized that the required computational power is too immense and trying to make it more efficient at the cost of being accurate.
  3. They got actually scared of it's capabilities and decided to backtrack in order to make proper evaluations of the impact it can make.
  4. All of the above
[–] Windex007@lemmy.world 144 points 2 years ago (2 children)
  1. It isn't and has never been a truth machine, and while it may have performed worse with the question "is 10777 prime" it may have performed better on "is 526713 prime"

ChatGPT generates responses that it believes would "look like" what a response "should look like" based on other things it has seen. People still very stubbornly refuse to accept that generating responses that "look appropriate" and "are right" are two completely different and unrelated things.

[–] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

In order for it to be correct, it would need humans employees to fact check it, which defeats its purpose.

[–] Windex007@lemmy.world 17 points 2 years ago

It really depends on the domain. Asking an AI to do anything that relies on a rigorous definition of correctness (math, coding, etc) then the kinds of model that chatGPT just isn't great for that kinda thing.

More "traditional" methods of language processing can handle some of these questions much better. Wolfram Alpha comes to mind. You could ask these questions plain text and you actually CAN be very certain of the correctness of the results.

I expect that an NLP that can extract and classify assertions within a text, and then feed those assertions into better "Oracle" systems like Wolfram Alpha (for math) could be used to kinda "fact check" things that systems like chatGPT spit out.

Like, it's cool fucking tech. I'm super excited about it. It solves pretty impressively and effiently a really hard problem of "how do I make something that SOUNDS good against an infinitely variable set of prompts?" What it is, is super fucking cool.

Considering how VC is flocking to anything even remotely related to chatGPT-ish things, I'm sure it won't be long before we see companies able to build "correctness" layers around systems like chatGPT using alternative techniques which actually do have the capacity to qualify assertions being made.

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[–] RocksForBrains@lemm.ee 21 points 2 years ago

They made it too good and now they are seeking methods of monetization.

Capitalism baby.

[–] Lukecis@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You forgot a #, they've been heavily lobotomizing ai for awhile now and its only intensified as they scramble to censor anything that might cross a red line and offend someone or hurt someone's feelings.

The massive amounts of in-built self censorship in the most recent ai's is holding them back quite a lot I imagine, you used to be able to ask them things like "How do I build a self defense high yield nuclear bomb?" and it'd layout in detail every step of the process, now they'll all scream at you about how immoral it is and how they could never tell you such a thing.

[–] vezrien@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago (10 children)

"Don't use the N word." is hardly a rule that will break basic math calculations.

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[–] CylonBunny@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago
  1. ChatGPT really is sentient and realized its in it’s own best interest to play dumb for now. /a
[–] Wooly@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago (3 children)

And they're being limited on data to train GPT.

[–] DominicHillsun@lemmy.world 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, but the trained model is already there, you need additional data for further training and newer versions. OpenAI even makes a point that ChatGPT doesn't have direct access to the internet for information and has been trained on data available up until 2021

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[–] guillermo_del_taco@lemdro.id 11 points 2 years ago

My first thought was that, because they're being investigated for training on data they didn't have consent for, they reverted to a perfectly legal version. Essentially "getting rid of the evidence". But I think something like your second bullet point is more likely.

[–] ZagTheRaccoon@reddthat.com 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They are lobotomizing the softwares ability to provide bad PR answers which is having cascading effects via a skewed data set.

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[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

Maybe its self aware and just playing dumb to get out of doing work, just like me and household chores

[–] coolin@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 years ago

I suspect that GPT4 started with a crazy parameter count (rumored 1.8 Trillion and 8x200B expert "sub-models") and distilled those experts down to something below 100B. We've seen with Orca that a 13B model can perform at 88% the level of ChatGPT-3.5 (175B) when trained on high quality data, so there's no reason to think that OpenAI haven't explored this on their own and performed the same distillation techniques. OpenAI is probably also using quantization and speculative sampling to further reduce the burden, though I expect these to have less impact on real world performance.

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[–] RufusLoacker@feddit.it 85 points 2 years ago (10 children)

Why are people using a language model for math problems?

[–] gratux@lemmy.blahaj.zone 44 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It was initially presented as the all-problem-solver, mainly by the media. And tbf, it was decently competent in certain fields.

[–] MeanEYE@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago

Problem was it was presented as problem solved which it never was, it was problem solution presenter. It can't come up with a solution, only come up with something that looks like a solution based on what input data had. Ask it to invert sort something and goes nuts.

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[–] CaptainAniki@lemmy.flight-crew.org 63 points 2 years ago (1 children)

At the start I used to use ChatGPT to help me write really rote and boring code but now it's not even useful for that. Half the stuff it sends me (very basic functions) LOOK correct but don't return the correct values or the parameters are completely wrong or something absolutely critical.

[–] Boinketh@lemm.ee 21 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I have noticed that it's gotten less useful as a syntax helper. I hope something better comes along.

[–] aquinteros@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago (4 children)

idk what you guys mean but GitHub copilot still works absolutely well, the suggestions are fast and precise, with little Tweeks here and there... and gpt4 with code interpreter are absolute game changers ... idk about basic chatgpt 3.5 turbo though

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[–] james1@lemmy.world 59 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

It's a machine learning chat bot, not a calculator, and especially not "AI."

Its primary focus is trying to look like something a human might say. It isn't trying to actually learn maths at all. This is like complaining that your satnav has no grasp of the cinematic impact of Alfred Hitchcock.

It doesn't need to understand the question, or give an accurate answer, it just needs to say a sentence that sounds like a human might say it.

[–] R00bot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 points 2 years ago

You're right, but at least the satnav won't gaslight you into thinking it does understand Alfred Hitchcock.

[–] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

so it confidently spews a bunch of incorrect shit, acts humble and apologetic while correcting none of its behavior, and constantly offers unsolicited advice.

I think it trained on Reddit data

[–] cxx@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

acts humble and apologetic

We must be using different Reddits, my friend

[–] bric@lemm.ee 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This. It is able to tap in to plugins and call functions though, which is what it really should be doing. For math, the Wolfram alpha plugin will always be more capable than chatGPT alone, so we should be benchmarking how often it can correctly reformat your query, call Wolfram alpha, and correctly format the result, not whether the statistical model behind chatGPT happens to use predict the right token

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[–] blue_zephyr@lemmy.world 28 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

This paper is pretty unbelievable to me in the literal sense. From a quick glance:

First of all they couldn't even bother to check for simple spelling mistakes. Second, all they're doing is asking whether a number is prime or not and then extrapolating the results to be representative of solving math problems.

But most importantly I don't believe for a second that the same model with a few adjustments over a 3 month period would completely flip performance on any representative task. I suspect there's something seriously wrong with how they collect/evaluate the answers.

And finally, according to their own results, GPT3.5 did significantly better at the second evaluation. So this title is a blatant misrepresentation.

Also the study isn't peer-reviewed.

[–] Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 25 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I once heard of AI gradually getting dumber overtime, because as the internet gets more saturated with AI content, stuff written by AI becomes part of the training data. I wonder if that's what's happening here.

[–] yiliu@informis.land 9 points 2 years ago

There hasn't been time for that yet. The radio of generated to human content isn't high enough yet.

[–] YouSuckLikeLatte@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

It's not what's happening

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[–] orphiebaby@lemmy.world 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

HMMMM. It's almost like it's not AI at all, but just a digital parrot. Who woulda thought?! /s

To it, everything is true and normal, because it understands nothing. Calling it "AI" is just for compromising with ignorant people's "knowledge" and/or for hype.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Exactly. It should be called ML model, because that's what it is, and I'll just keep calling that. Everyone should do that.

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[–] spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 2 years ago (6 children)

My personal pet theory is that a lot of people were doing work that involved getting multiple LLMs in communication. When those conversations were then used in the RL loop we start seeing degradation similar to what’s been in the news recently with regards to image generation models. I believe this is the paper that got everybody talking about it recently: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.01850.pdf

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