Incantations 87 - ChatGPT is Getting Old

​

Hello there, [NICKNAME GOES HERE],

Some paperwork I was waiting on is now all sorted so I should be heading home in a few weeks back to merry old England. It's been a hectic week for me this week so a shorter newsletter than usual.

​

ChatGPT Worse than it Was

There's a lot of evidence that ChatGPT (and especially the latest model of GPT 4) isn't as creative, accurate or extensive as it was before. A lot of this may be down to the way OpenAI has had to put in certain restrictions for ethical and possibly future legal reasons, by adding all these patches and artificial frameworks over the top of the language model it's very much hampered what it was capable of doing. Just one example article here:
​https://siliconangle.com/2023/07/20/research-paper-suggests-openais-gpt-4-may-become-less-accurate/​

Is this a trend towards a dumbing down of AI to keep things under control? Have we already seen the golden age of large language models?

​

Prompt Engineers Save the Day

This could be good news for budding prompt engineers and AI wranglers. It's going to be more important than ever to have people who truly understand AI and large language models to get the best out of them and know what the results mean and what to do with them. Whether ChatGPT continues to degrade or they correct their corrections to open it up, or they come up with a sideways shift to something better, it's important to keep on top of what's happening and how to best use these tools, because if you don't others certainly will be using them to their advantage.

​

ChatGPT isn't the Only One in Town

ChatGPT has the spotlight but there are others and while many competitors, such as Bard, Claud, LLama, have been seen as inferior they could end up leapfrogging ChatGPT with all the restrictions and amendments going on, and whatever happens with new legislation that may force restrictions we can be sure now the technology is out there there will be alternatives that people can use, from open source efforts to eventually people simply building their own large language models and AI.

​

I'll certainly be diving into trying other tools out there, it's worth having your own alternative and backups if nothing else. We don't want a single entity such as OpenAI (the creators of ChatGPT) to be a monopoly in the AI space, we will get more advancement and creativity with more competition. That has risks but also huge benefits for all of us.

​

Until next week,

Andrew

​

​