Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?
Is it consistently worse or just sometimes&#x2F;often worse than before? Any extreme power users or GPT-whisperers here? If it’s only noticeably worse X% of the time my bet would be experimentation.<p>One of my least favorite patterns that tech companies do is use “Experimentation” overzealously or prematurely. Mainly, my problem is they’re not transparent about it, and it creates an inconsistent product experience that just confuses you - why did this one Zillow listing have this UI order but the similar one I clicked seconds later had a different one? Why did this page load on Reddit get some weirdass font? Because it’s an experiment the bar to launch is low and you’re not gonna find any official blog posts about the changes until it’s official. And when it causes serious problems, there’s nowhere to submit a form or tell you why, and only very rarely would support, others, or documentation even realize some change is from an experiment. Over the past few years I’ve started noticing this <i>everywhere</i> online.<p>Non-sticky UI experiments are especially bad because at eg 1% of pageloads the signal is going to be measuring users asking themselves wtf is up and temporarily spending more time on page trying to figure out where the data moved. Sticky and&#x2F;or less noticeable experiments like what this <i>could be</i> have stronger signals but are even more annoying as a user, because there’s no notice that you’re essentially running some jank beta version, and no way to opt back into the default - for you it’s just broken. Especially not cool if you’re a paying customer.<p>I’m not saying it’s necessarily an experiment, it could be just a regular release or nothing at all. I’d hope if OpenAI was actually reducing the parameter size of their models they’d publicly announce that, but I could totally see them running an experiment measuring how a cheaper, smaller model affects usage and retention without publishing anything, because it’s exactly the kind of “right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing” thing that happens at fancy schmancy tech companies.