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...

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨L4s@lemmy.world [bot]⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

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 ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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:

They are doing it on purpose to maximise profits from upcoming releases of ChatGPT.

They realized that the required computational power is too immense and trying to make it more efficient at the cost of being accurate.

They got actually scared of it’s capabilities and decided to backtrack in order to make proper evaluations of the impact it can make.

All of the above
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- Windex007@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - oktoberpaard@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    That’s not necessarily true: arstechnica.com/…/googles-bard-ai-can-now-write-a…. If the question gets interpreted correctly and it manages to write working code to answer it, it could correctly answer questions that it has never seen before.
    
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- ProcurementCat@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  There’s a bug they haven’t found yet
  
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  - killerinstinct101@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    This is what was addressed at the start of the comment, you can just roll back to a previous version. It’s heavily ingrained in CS to keep every single version of your software forever.
    
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- RocksForBrains@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  They made it too good and now they are seeking methods of monetization.
  
  Capitalism baby.
  
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- Lukecis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - vezrien@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    “Don’t use the N word.” is hardly a rule that will break basic math calculations.
    
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- Wooly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  And they’re being limited on data to train GPT.
  
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  - DominicHillsun@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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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  - fidodo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    That doesn’t make any sense to explain degradation. It would explain a stall but not a back track.
    
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  - WalkableProgrammer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Honestly I think the training data is just getting worse too
    
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- ZagTheRaccoon@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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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  - T156@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    We kind of saw something similar with services like AI Dungeon, where them trying to strip out NSFW/bad PR meant that the quality dropped immensely.
    
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- CylonBunny@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  ChatGPT really is sentient and realized its in it’s own best interest to play dumb for now. /a
  
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- cyd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  [deleted]
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  - DominicHillsun@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Sure, but they do have the previous good version of the black box… I hope lol
    
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- fidodo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  My guess is 2. It would be very short sighted to try and maximize profits now when things are still new and their competitors are catching up quickly or they’ve already caught up especially with the degrading performance. My guess is that they couldn’t scale with the demand and they didn’t want to lose customers so their only other option was degrading performance.
  
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- JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It can get better at some things and worse at others.
  
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  - LUHG_HANI@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    That Netscape gif is slick.
    
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- Xanvial@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I think it’s most likely number 2 The earlier release doesn’t have that much adoption by public, so current version will need much more resources compared to that
  
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- spiderman@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I think that there is another cause. Remember the screenshots of users correcting chatgpt wrongly? I mean chatgpt takes user’s inputs for it’s benefit and maybe too much of these wrong and funny inputs and chatgpt’s own mistake of not regulating what it should take in and what it should not might be a reason to.
  
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- 30isthenew29@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It’s trying to f with the users now.
  
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- Hextic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’m telling all y’all it’s a SABOTAGE 🎵
  
  As in, rouge dev decided to toss a wrench at it to save humanity. Maybe heard upper management talk about letting GPT write itself. Any smart dev wouldn’t automate their own job away I think.
  
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- gelberhut@lemdro.id ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Keeping conspiracy theories aside, they most probably, apply tricks to reduce costs and apply extra policies to avoid generation of harmful context or context someone will try to sue them.
  
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james1@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s a machine learning chat bot, not a calculator, and especially not “AI.”

It’s 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.

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- R00bot@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You’re right, but at least the satnav won’t gaslight you into thinking it does understand Alfred Hitchcock.
  
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- TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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
  
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  - cxx@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    acts humble and apologetic
    
    We must be using different Reddits, my friend
    
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- bric@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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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  - Gork@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It sounds like it’s time to merge Wolfram Alpha’s and ChatGPT’s capabilities together to create the ultimate calculator.
    
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- Gazumbo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  If it’s trying emulate a human then it’s spot on. I suck at maths.
  
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- dbilitated@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  to be fair, fucking up maths problems is very human-like.
  
  I wonder if it could also be trained on a great deal of mathematical axioms that are computer generated?
  
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  - Cabrio@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It doesn’t calculate anything though. You ask chatgpt what is 5+5, and it tells you the most statistically likely response based on training data. Now we know there’s a lot of both moronic and intentionally belligerent answers on the Internet, so the statistical probability of it getting any mathematical equation correct goes down exponemtially with complexity and never even approaches 100% certainty even with the simplest equations because 1+1= window.
    
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RufusLoacker@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Why are people using a language model for math problems?

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- gratux@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It was initially presented as the all-problem-solver, mainly by the media. And tbf, it was decently competent in certain fields.
  
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  - Lukecis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Once AGI is achieved and subsequently Sentient-super intelligent ai- I cant imagine them not being such a thing, however I’d be surprised if a super intelligent sentient ai doesn’t decide humanity needs to go extinct for its own best self interests.
    
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- affiliate@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  it’s pretty useful for explaining high level math concepts, or at least it used to be. before chatgpt 4 launched, it was able to give intuitive descriptions of stuff in algebraic topology and even prove some properties of the structures involved.
  
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- freedomenjoyer@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Well it was quite good for simple math problems, as this study also shows
  
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- lorcster123@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It can be useful asking it certain questions which are a bit complex. Like on a plot which has the y axis linear and x axis logarithmic, the equation of a straight line is a little bit complicated. Its in the form y = m*(log(x)) + b rather than on a linear-linear plot which is y = mx+b
  
  ChatGPT is able to calculate the correct equation of the line but it gets the answer wrong a few times… lol
  
  Image
  
  This image is an example, the line going down diagonally has a bit of a strange equation y = 30 - 19.2*(log(F/150))
  
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- Steeve@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  And why is it being measured on a single math problem lol
  
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CaptainAniki@lemmy.flight-crew.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- Boinketh@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I have noticed that it’s gotten less useful as a syntax helper. I hope something better comes along.
  
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  - aquinteros@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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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blue_zephyr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This paper is pretty unbelievable to me in the literal sense. 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 probe the models.

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orphiebaby@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s almost like it’s not AI, but just a digital parrot. To it, everything is true and normal, because it understands nothing. Calling it “AI” is just for pandering and/or hype.

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- Mikina@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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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  - orphiebaby@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    What does that stand for? O:
    
    You’d think I’d know that since I’m talking about AI; but actually most of my knowledge is about how things work or don’t work, not current trends/news.
    
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Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- yiliu@informis.land ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  There hasn’t been time for that yet. The radio of generated to human content isn’t high enough yet.
  
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- YouSuckLikeLatte@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It’s not what’s happening
  
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- Ullallulloo@civilloquy.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I don’t think the training data has really been updated since its release. This is just them tuning the model, either to save on energy or to filter out undesirable responses.
  
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- ClamDrinker@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  As long as humans are still the driving force behind what content gets spread around (and thus, far more represented in the training data), even if the content is AI generated, it shouldn’t matter. But it’s quite definitely not the case here.
  
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stappern@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
yepp,thats why its gonna be a LONG time before nay of these tools are given administrator access to anything worth a fuck.

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housepanther@lemmy.goblackcat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It just occurred to me that one could purposely seed it with incorrect information to break its usefulness. I’m anti-AI so I would gladly do this. I might try it myself.

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Spaceballstheusername@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Can someone explain why they don’t take the approach where things are somewhat compartmentalized. So you have a image processing program, a math program, a music program, etc and like the human brain that has cross talk but also dedicated certain parts of your brain to do specific things.

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Blamemeta@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Turns out you need very good computer scientists to make good AI. And those are very expensive and hard to come by.

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solstice@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
GPT was always really bad at math.

I’ve asked it word problems before and it fails miserably, giving me insane answers that make no sense. For example, I was curious once how many stars you would expect to find in a region of the milky way with a radius of 650 light years, assuming an average of 4 light years per star. The first answer it gave me was like a trillion stars or something, and I asked it if that makes sense to it, a trillion stars in a subset of space known to only contain about a quarter of that number, and it gave me a wildly different answer. I asked it to check again and it gave me a third wildly different number.

Sometimes it doubles down on wrong answers.

GPT is amazing but it’s got a long way to go.

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lorcster123@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I used GPT4 the other day and it worked perfectly for calculating formulas of straight lines on linear-log plots but maybe I was the 2%

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zikk_transport2@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Looks like GPT4 API also got dumber…

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