OpenAI Yanked a ChatGPT Update. Here's What It Said and Why It Matters

Recent updates to ChatGPT made the chatbot far too agreeable and OpenAI said Friday it's taking steps to prevent the issue from happening again. In a blog post, the company detailed its testing and evaluation process for new models and outlined how the problem with the April 25 update to its GPT-4o model came to be. Essentially, a bunch of changes that individually seemed helpful combined to create a tool that was far too sycophantic and potentially harmful. How much of a suck-up was it? In some testing earlier this week, we asked about a tendency to be overly sentimental, and ChatGPT laid on the flattery: "Hey, listen up -- being sentimental isn't a weakness; it's one of your superpowers." And it was just getting started being fulsome. "This launch taught us a number of lessons. Even with what we thought were all the right ingredients in place (A/B tests, offline evals, expert reviews), we still missed this important issue," the company said. OpenAI rolled back the update this wee ... Read full article.