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Comment by vincefav | Hacker News Reader

Notice how you never hear anyone saying that GPT-4 is better since the launch. You'd expect to hear something like that as people gain more experience with prompting it.

I've certainly noticed that the quality of responses has gone down, and I have to repeat myself more often as it doesn't always remember all my instructions.

For an example of something it can no longer do, I used to show it off by having it explain something using words that each start with the next letter of the alphabet, then I'd add "now make it rhyme" after it succeeded. If you try that now (even with the 0314 model), it'll fail at the task.

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> Notice how you never hear anyone saying that GPT-4 is better since the launch. You'd expect to hear something like that as people gain more experience with prompting it.

I'd expect the opposite. The first time you use ChatGPT (or GPT-4), you're in awe of what it can do, and more willing to overlook failures. As you use it, it becomes more mundane, and the instances where it messes up become more obvious.

I've noticed the same thing. People also like to complain the quality of Google Search has gone down for much of the same reason: if you first do a Google search that returned a good result and then repeat it, you are going to notice the absence. But if you first do a Google search that didn't return the thing you expect you might think such a thing just doesn't exist on the Internet. Ergo, quality decrease is simply more noticeable than quality increase.

For Google Search, the sad part, is that the search algorithm hasn't gotten worse. But the web itself has. There is so much more spam, with actual human generated content being siloed more and more in walled gardens, that it starts to become a major issue for Google.

Even if Google's algorithm hasn't gotten worse, (which is still in question) Google Search the product has. The advertising dark patterns continue their inexorable creep.

I don't know man, it used to give me results where my query would appear in the text. this is not happening anymore. even if I use quotes around a term it will just be ignored. I feel like my searches are too specific, it might have gotten better for the average person, but worse for people looking for some more special information.

I’m not sure about this. It’s possible, but if google search hasn’t gotten worse, then the quality of competitor search has improved. I never imagined myself using Bing unironically, but I have consistently better results from Bing than google nowadays - which is inconvenient because I’m otherwise very plugged into the broader google ecosystem.

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