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Comment by throwuwu | Hacker News Reader

It’s very important to qualify this with which model you are using. 3.5 and 4 are very different in the quality of answers they give, the version numbering is deceptive.

As a side note, although I can’t confirm this it seems like the general quality of answers for both 3.5 and 4 decreased over time. I suspect they are doing further RLHF which has shown to make the model stupider for lack of a better word.

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3.5 and 4 are basically completely different products. 3.5 is an great free tool that you can use to tidy up your emails before sending them, and that can summarize and explain simple concepts to you so you don't have to wade through Google search results or scroll through long Wikipedia articles.

GPT-4 can actually do stuff: it hallucinates an order of magnitude less often, generates working code, and can explain complex subjects with nuance. It's still a bit of an idiot: it's output is intern level at best, but having a lightning fast intern at my disposal 27/4 has already revolutionized my workflow.

Using 3.5

There are probably things you could do to get more out of 3.5, but 4 is waaaaaay, way better for every complex thing I've tried. 3.5 was helpful on some margins when I remembered it, but 4 is a huge part of my workflows now.

3.5 vs 4 is like day and night. Try to get you impressions on v4

Not the OP but good to know. How does 4 compare to Bard?

3.5 is arguably better than Bard on some coding use cases and higher accuracy. 4 is just much, much better than both of them.

I must have a play with GPT4 at some point. For me, 3.5 generates working code more often than not and rarely hallucinates.

There is a trick to get better performance out of 3.5, examples specifically in Q&A format. You basically have to show it how you want it to act first and then ask your question or whatever. It can be a pain to craft a good prompt but the really important and amazing thing is that the knowledge it gains from the examples is transferable to other similar tasks! So you don’t have to answer your own question, just show it how you prefer questions to be answered and then ask the question you want the answer to (or tell it to perform the task you want it to) and you can reuse the prompt for other questions.

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