Hacker News Reader

Comment by sovietmudkipz | Hacker News Reader

I’m hoping GPT will remove the information cutoff date. I write plenty of terraform/AWS and it’s a bit of a pain that the latest API isn’t accessible by GPT yet.

There’s been quite a bit happening in the programming space since sept 2021.

I use GPT to keep things high level and then do my normal research methodology for implementation details.

View on HN

It's not like an arbitrary imposition, that's the data it was trained on and it's expensive to train. I hope they find a way to continually train in new information too but it's not like they can just remove the cutoff date.

Not disagreeing, but a fascinating thing they did (as a one-off fine-tune?) was teach ChatGPT about the openai python client library, including the features that were added after the cutoff date.

I enjoy using GPT4 as a co-programmer, and funny enough it is very challenging to get advice on Microsoft's own .NET MAUI because that framework was in prerelease at the time the model was trained.

My understanding is right now they essentially need to train a new model on a new updated corpus to fix this, but maybe some other techniques could be devised...or they'll train something more up to date.

Context drift! https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

You might actually get pretty far if you just went through the Microsoft docs and created a bunch of really concise examples and fed that as the start of the prompt. Use like 6-7kb for that and then the question at the end.

I have had some luck doing exactly that, and not even as efficiently as you describe - If my question is limited enough that the discussion won't overwhelm the context window I've found I can just paste in big chunks of the docs wholesale like a 'zero shot.'

Injecting the context yourself can help a lot. I frequently copy in a bunch of example code at the beginning of the conversation to help prime ChatGPT on APIs it knows nothing about.

For smaller projects that will fit, I've taken to: `xclip *` and then pasting the entire collection of files into ChatGPT before describing what I want to do.

Keep in mind that GPT-4 has a max context size of ~8000 tokens, if I recall correctly. That means that in any given ChatGPT session the bot only remembers roughly the last ~6k words, as a trailing window. It'll forget the stuff at the beginning fast.

As stated your request is entirely impossible. They cannot simply "remove the cut-off date". It takes months and huge amounts of hardware to train. Then they do the reinforcement adjustments on top of it while researching how to train the next batch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com