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Comment by nmfisher | Hacker News Reader

I haven't had a chance to use the GPT-4 API yet - is it that much better than the GPT-4 available via ChatGPT? Or am I misunderstanding?

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Anecdotal evidence here - I find that the API is less likely to ask questions about what you are doing and get straight to the answer.

For example, if I were to ask how to do something with burp it will just answer instead of going into the "as an AI" monologue.

Do something with burp?

Burpsuite.

ChatGPT uses the GPT-4 API, so it's the same. With the API directly though you can change the system prompt, which can enable better results if you know what you're doing.

ChatGPT is a wrapper to the GPT Completion API with some sane defaults. With a new beta feature you can edit the system prompt via ChatGPT, but you still can't adjust the other parameters you can reach with the API.

ChatGPT uses the GPT-4, but there are conspiracy theories circling that ChatGPT is neutered and thus not as good as GPT-4 through the API. The theory being that OpenAI are thottling the free version of GPT-4 (ChatGPT)

Free ChatGPT runs 3.5. You have to upgrade to plus to use GPT-4. The APIs seem close to ChatGPT, but it’s a little opaque what they’re actually doing. If you inspect network requests the models are named something like “chat-render-3.5” instead of the API model names.

I’d imagine OpenAI might run experiments on ChatGPT that they wouldn’t on the API, to avoid breaking 3rd party applications unannounced.

That's, uh, not a conspiracy theory. The free version of ChatGPT uses an entirely different model on the backend.

I use the GPT4 API and still think it got neutered since I first started using it.

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