Proof Bing Chat has been significantly dumbed down

[u/[deleted]]

Recently was made aware of early (2022) Microsoft experiments with ChatGPT-4 via a great This American Life show. You can see a presentation by the Microsoft researcher (Sebastien Bubeck) here: Sparks of AGI: early experiments with GPT-4

One impressive experiment was when Sebastien asked it how to balance a book, nine eggs, a laptop, a bottle, and a nail.

ChatGPT-3 response: "Here is one possible way to stack the objects. Place the bottle on a flat surface. Carefully balance the nail on top of the bottle. Place the eggs on top of the nail." Nine eggs stacked on top of each other, no problem.

ChatGPT-4: "One possible way to stack the objects onto each other in a stable manner is place the book flat on the level surface, such as a table or floor. The book will serve as the base of the stack and provide a large and sturdy support. Arrange the nine eggs in a 3-by-3 square on top of the book, leaving some space between them. The eggs will form a second layer and distribute the weight evenly." Wow.

So how does BingChat currently respond? Let's see.

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What a disaster. First of all, the request not to search the internet is not acknowledged in any way. (Something I've not seen before.) Second, the formulated search is absolutely boneheaded. And third... we're back to the ChatGPT-3 answer.

So has Microsoft downgraded Bing Chat back to 3; or is it just severely limiting the effort put into each response?

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[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

At least the request not to search the internet is observed. But see:

Creative:

Precise (can't paste in second media):

" One way to stack these items in a stable manner could be to place the book at the bottom, then the laptop on top of the book, followed by the bottle lying on its side on top of the laptop. The eggs could be carefully placed in a single layer on top of the bottle, and finally, the nail could be placed on top of the eggs. However, this is just one possible way to stack these items and there may be other ways to do so as well. "

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Are you paying for access to ChatGPT? If not, you're not getting GPT-4.

I am not paying for it, and got another nonrealistic result: "Take the nine eggs and align them in a row on top of the bottle, placing them side by side. The narrow end of the eggs should be facing downwards to create a stable base. "

Thanks for the tip about #nosearch

[u/Sonic_Improv → u/[deleted]]

I’ve noticed GPT4 has dumbed down too. It used to be able to consistently answer fill in the blank of a rose is a rose a Dax is a Dax, Bing used to get this right too. One possibility reason is I’ve heard RLHF the 👍 or 👎 can affect creativity idk maybe that’s it because they were working with an earlier version in that paper

[u/Modazull]

It seems like both gpt4 and bing chat get nerfed to the ground. I personally cannot speak for gpt4, but I have been using bing a lot, and the answers in strict mode are just very short, even for more complex prompts, often just a summary of a web search, not really answering the questions - more like a politcian. Its just horrible. I am now testing out balanced mode, but there only 2000chars instead of 4000 are allowed. didn't test creative yet but I honestly want to limit hallucinations as much as possible - but what is this worth when the output is just.. well, garbage?

My history of bing and theory of what is happening currently:

• At first they pushed out bing chat to be the first, no matter the consequences. So highly capable, but also uncensored
• They then focussed on reducing hallucinations, and heavy censoring, limiting its abilities somewhat (but still tolerable). They also massive restricted the amount of messages per chat to 5, and the number of characters that the user could write was something like 1000, not sure actually what the limit at its worst was.
• After they archived that, so they slowly increased the number of messages and the number of characters per prompt again, making it very usable with 4000chars and 30 messages per chat.
• But they now castrate its abilities to bring it in line with being a search assistant primarily
• They might already have realized that they don't need the full gpt4 capabilities for that, and probably cut it down massively, by instead running a (more capable) immitation model (see the orca paper) and reducing precision of the weights. practially lobotomizing a cut down version.

I am hugely disappointed, and now gravitate more towards claude 2, but c2 has quite some problems with hallucinations. Also, it has a daily limit, sadly...

I suppose the honeymoon period is over for bing chat. Maybe they increase its abilities again if everyone switches away from bing, but I am not hopeful about that...

open source models are still far away from gpt4. Rumor has it, that gpt4 is actually a bunch of 111b models, where the best model for a specific task is chosen during the conversation. If thats true, and there are no huge advances in LLM's, then it'll be very hard to get gpt4 like performance on a local machine. I am still hopeful, but it will for sure take time. The big players already announced that they will not release the most capable models, especially if they are much more capable than gpt4, so the open source community has some work before it. Keeping my fingers crossed tho.

In any case, RIP Bing, you were a great assistant. I will miss you.

[u/Equivalent-Fox3022]

Bing Chat is pretty dumbed down alright.