GPT-4 performs significantly worse on coding problems not in its training data
This has been my experience. I’m really impressed by how well GPT-4 seems to be able to interpolate between problems heavily represented in the training data to create what feels like novelty, eg. Creating a combination of pong and conway’s game of life, but it doesn’t seem to be good at extrapolation.<p>The type of work I do is highly niche. I’ve recently been working on a specific problem for which there are probably only a hundred at most implementations running on production systems, all of them highly proprietary. I would be surprised if there were any implementations in GPTs training set. With that said, this problem is not actually that complicated. A rudimentary implementation can be done in ~100 lines of code.<p>I asked GPT-4 to write me an implementation. It knew a decent amount about the problem (probably from Wikipedia). If it was actually capable of something close to reasoning it should have been able to write an implementation, but when it actually started writing code it was reluctant to write more than a skeleton. When I pushed it to implement specific details it completely fell apart and started hallucinating. When I gave it specific information about what it was doing wrong it acknowledged that it made a mistake and simply gave me a new equally wrong hallucination.<p>The experience calmed my existential fears about my job being taken by AI.