As ChatGPT gets "lazy," people test "winter break hypothesis" as the cause

As ChatGPT gets "lazy," people test "winter break hypothesis" as the cause(arstechnica.com)

23 points by dddavid 2 years ago | 7 comments

samuria 2 years ago |

I don't know if this was the case before, but yesterday I asked a question, and it thunk for a while before answering: "Based on the title of this video, it may answer your question", then provided a link to a YouTube video. The video did not answer my question.

thesimp 2 years ago |

In order to have the "winter blues" you must know that it is winter. And in all my questions to ChatGPT I never had positive feedback that it knows what time it is, what date it is, and what the current season is.

My theory is that someone left a DEBUG=1 flag somewhere in the code and that the debug.log is filling up to 4 GB. I'm only joking a bit, I've been bitten enough times by these type of issues to know that they must happen all over the place.

theblazehen 2 years ago | |

The ChatGPT web ui system prompt includes the current date. You can see the default system prompt at https://github.com/LouisShark/chatgpt_system_prompt/blob/mai...

_xerces_ 2 years ago | | |

You can also know this by reading the article too: "Since the system prompt for ChatGPT feeds the bot the current date, people noted, some began to think there may be something to the idea."

gardenhedge 2 years ago | |

> In order to have the "winter blues" you must know that it is winter

Can you explain your thinking behind this?

thesimp 2 years ago | | |

The article suggests that ChatGPT slows down because it is winter and in the winter people (and data on which ChatGPT trained) sometimes slow down: the dark/gloomy/depressing winter feeling. To which I made the statement that ChatGPT does not know that it is winter so the hypothesis in the linked article does not hold up.

Several people have commented that ChatGPT does know the current time and date, so maybe there is indeed some truth in the linked article. But it does show how inconsistent ChatGPT can be: in any interaction I had with it I could not get CHatGPT to admit that it knew the current time, date, or season.

MISTERJerk2U 2 years ago |

“What if it learned from its training data that people usually slow down in December and put bigger projects off until the new year, and that’s why it’s been more lazy lately?"