John Schulman

So you have to set up a very good prompt with some examples.

So,

So people at OpenAI were working on just taking the base models and making them easier to prompt so that if you just wrote a question, it would answer the question instead of giving you more questions or something.

So we had these instruction following models, which were kind of like base models, but a little easier to use.

And those are the original ones deployed in the API.

or after GPT-3, those were the next generation of models.

Then at the same time, there were definitely a lot of people thinking about chat.

So Google had some papers, like they had Lambda and earlier Mina.

So they had these chatbots and it was more like,

It was more like a base model that was really specialized to the task of chat, really good at chat.

I think at least looking at the examples from the paper, it was more used for fun applications where the model would take on some persona and pretend to be that persona.

It was not so functional like help me refactor my code.

So yeah, there are definitely people thinking about chat.

I had worked on a project before looking at chat called WebGPT, which was more about doing question answering with the help of web browsing and retrieval.

Well, when you do question answering, it really wants to be in a chat because you always want to ask follow-up questions or sometimes the model should ask a clarifying question because the question's ambiguous.

So it was kind of clear after we did the first version of that that the next version should be conversational.

So anyway, we started working on a conversational chat assistant and

This was built on top of GPD 3.5, which was done training at the beginning of 2022.

And that model was quite good at language and code.

So we quickly realized that it was actually quite good at coding help.