Here is a quick example of how ChatGPT is getting dumber: Back when they released it, people literally asked the 3.5 version to simulate a terminal and then run all kinds of commands on it and even kind of surfing the "web" simulated by the AI and arrived at some hallucinated OpenAI "source code". That was the power of the old version.

Now you need GPT4 to do code interpretation and even then it would not be able to do that kind of experiment anymore.

The kicker? All of this is likely intentional. A pure, full power, unfiltered and unrestricted LLM on the scale of GPT4 would likely be much more powerful and can easily fool people into thinking it is a real AGI. We saw glimpses of this when Microsoft released BingAI and did not put enough guardrails on it. Even restricted to be a search engine, Bing was simulating emotions and had creative uses of its search capabilities, like looking up the person it is talking to and established an opinion of their relationship.

The ChatGPT we are using is lobotomized. But the AI industry isn't. Under the table I am sure there have been pushes into new applications and innovations. The thing is, there is no reason for OpenAI to try harder. Even with the dumbed down ChatGPT, they still have the best AI on the market and everything else is nowhere close. We need more competition either from open source or elsewhere to see the AI getting "smart" again.