Sam Altman says ChatGPT should be 'much less lazy now'
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- Sam Altman wrote on X that ChatGPT should be "much less lazy now" after OpenAI rolled out an update.
- Some users have complained the AI is refusing to complete tasks and giving lackluster responses.
- It's not clear what caused the slump, with one developer blaming seasonal depression.
ChatGPT has made a slow start to the year — but Sam Altman says the chatty AI is now past its winter slump.
The OpenAI CEO said that the chatbot should be "much less lazy now," after the startup rolled out a fix for an issue that saw some users complain that ChatGPT was refusing to complete tasks and getting sassy with them.
"Gpt-4 had a slow start on its new year's resolutions but should be much less lazy now," Altman wrote in a post on X.
Users began complaining late last year that the chatbot, which has reportedly racked up around 1.7 billion users since it launched in 2022, was slacking off and refusing to complete some tasks.
One startup founder asked the talkative AI to generate a list of all the weeks between November 2023 and May 2024, only to be told that the chatbot could not provide an "exhaustive list."
Some users found inventive strategies to get around ChatGPT's laziness, with one finding that the AI model would provide longer responses if they promised to tip it $200.
OpenAI acknowledged the problem at the time, and rolled out a software update in January that it said fixed issues of "laziness" in its advanced GPT-4 "turbo" model.
It's unclear what exactly caused ChatGPT to start taking it easy.
AI models are prone to unpredictable behavior that even their creators can struggle to fully understand, with OpenAI noting that different training runs can produce models with drastically different personalities and quirks, even if they are all trained on the same data.
One developer even suggested that ChatGPT might be taking a winter break.
Rob Lynch posted on X that he had run a test on GPT-4 turbo which showed that it would give statistically shorter answers when it "thought" it was December rather than May.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.