The Lemmy Club

High-profile A.I. chatbot ChatGPT performed worse on certain tasks in June than its March version, a Stanford University study found.

The study compared the performance of the chatbot, created by OpenAI, over several months at four “diverse” tasks: solving math problems, answering sensitive questions, generating software code, and visual reasoning.

Researchers found wild fluctuations—called drift—in the technology’s ability to perform certain tasks. The study looked at two versions of OpenAI’s technology over the time period: a version called GPT-3.5 and another known as GPT-4. The most notable results came from research into GPT-4’s ability to solve math problems. Over the course of the study researchers found that in March GPT-4 was able to correctly identify that the number 17077 is a prime number 97.6% of the times it was asked. But just three months later, its accuracy plummeted a lowly 2.4%. Meanwhile, the GPT-3.5 model had virtually the opposite trajectory. The March version got the answer to the same question right just 7.4% of the time—while the June version was consistently right, answering correctly 86.8% of the time.

"The chatbot gave wildly different answers to the same math problem, with one version of ChatGPT even refusing to show how it came to its conclusion."

It's getting worse. And because it's a black box model they don't know why. The computer science professor here likens it to how human students make mistakes... but human students make mistakes because they don't have perfect recall, mishear things being told to them, are tired and/or not paying attention... A bunch of reason that basically relate to having a human body that needs food, rest and water. A thing a computer does not have.

The only reason ChatGPT should be getting math wrong is that it's getting inputs that are wrong, but without view into it they can't figure out where it's getting it wrong and who told it the wrong info.