After confirming that OpenAI would be rolling back the latest updates to its flagship ChatGPT chatbot following user complaints of it being “annoying”, CEO Sam Altman on May 1 said goodbye.
“goodbye, GPT-4. you kicked off a revolution. we will proudly keep your weights on a special hard drive to give to some historians in the future (sic),” Sam Altman wrote on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter).
‘Working on Fixes to Model Personality’
On April 28, the 39-year-old acknowledged that ChatGPT-4o had become “too sycophant” and “annoying”. The admission came only days after OpenAI announced the new update, claiming it gave the chatbot “improved intelligence and personality”.
Then on April 30, Sam Altman confirmed that OpenAI has decided to roll back the latest updates to ChatGPT, i.e. GPT-4, amid overwhelmingly negative user feedback about its “annoying” personality.
He said: “we started rolling back the latest update to GPT-4o last night. it’s now 100 per cent rolled back for free users and we’ll update again when it’s finished for paid users, hopefully later today. we’re working on additional fixes to model personality and will share more in the coming days. (sic)”
ChatGPT: What Changes Can We Expect?
The company itself had on April 29 in a blogpost announced that updates to the ChatGPT-4o model have been rolled back. The post, titled ‘Sycophancy in GPT-4o’, said the model “leaned too heavily on short-term user feedback and skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous”.
“Sycophantic interactions can be uncomfortable, unsettling, and cause distress. We fell short and are working on getting it right. We are actively testing new fixes to address the issue,” the post added.
Further, OpenAI said that the company is also “revising how we collect and incorporate feedback to heavily weight long-term user satisfaction”, besides adding more personalisation features, to give users “greater control over how ChatGPT behaves”.
