Researchers found that ChatGPT’s performance varied significantly over time, showing “wild fluctuations” in its ability to solve math problems, answer questions, generate code, and do visual reasoning between March and June 2022. In particular, ChatGPT’s accuracy in solving math problems dropped drastically from over 97% in March to just 2.4% in June for one test. ChatGPT also stopped explaining its reasoning for answers and responses over time, making it less transparent. While ChatGPT became “safer” by avoiding engaging with sensitive questions, researchers note that providing less rationale limits understanding of how the AI works. The study highlights the need to continuously monitor large language models to catch performance drifts over time.
I actually did that for some code, and it did work.
I asked chatgpt to write me a prompt that would make chatgpt write a recursive function for uploading files and all files in subdirectories to a server as “multipart forms”, because when I asked it to modify my code originally it was just giving me a do-while loop, whereas I wanted a recursive function.
I kept changing my prompts to try to phrase “write a recursive function” differently, and instead the prompt that chatgpt gave me explicitly told it not to use non-recursive logic. Weirdly, forbidding it from using non-recursive logic actually made it finally give me the proper function.