New alignment paper from OpenAI. A couple of fascinating things in it:
Prompt engineering, one of the most interesting approaches to getting good results from GPT-3, is apparently no longer needed for many tasks with InstructGPT models. Before, you would need to “prime” GPT-3 with a few question/answer examples so it knew what you were getting at. Now it seems just the question will do.
InstructGPT is 100x smaller (!) than GPT-3 (1.3B params vs 175B) but its outputs are rated higher by human labellers for these tasks. It’s somehow nice that the team that kicked off the current GIANT MODELS arms race is also taking steps in a different direction.
Thirdly – this is an academic paper showing good results in aligning language models to certain human requirements. And that’s great! But if you log in to your OpenAI account… the model is right there, launched, and is actually the default model for all requests. OpenAI is very much a product company now, not just a research company.
(Original Twitter thread here).