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by dojitza1 953 days ago
An interesting solution to the blind spot error (taken directly from Jeremy Howard's amazing guide to language models - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkrNMKz9pWU) is to erase the chat history and try again. Once GPT has made an error (or as the author of this article says, the early layers have irreversibly pruned some important data), it will very often start to be even more wrong.
2 comments

When this happens, I'll usually say something along the lines of:

"This isn't working and I'd like to start this again with a new ChatGPT conversation. Can you suggest a new improved prompt to complete this task, that takes into account everything we've learned so far?"

It has given me good prompt suggestions that can immediately get a script working on the first try, after a frustrating series of blind spot bugs.

I do a similar thing when the latest GPT+DALLE version says "I'm sorry I can't make a picture of that because it would violate content standards" (yesterday, this was because I asked for a visualization of medication acting to reduce arterial plaque. I can only assume arteries in the body ended up looking like dicks)

So I say "Ok, let's start over. Rewrite my prompt in a way that minimizes the chance of the resulting image producing something that would trigger content standards checking"

I’ll give this a try when it undoubtedly happens to me later today while debugging something ;)
It seems surprising that this would work, because in my experience these LLMs don't really have good prompt-crafting skills.

Can you please share a ChatGPT example where that was successful, including having the new prompt outperform the old one?

I've also not had much success with asking it to craft prompts.
This is one benefit of using Playground: it's easy to delete or edit individual entries, so you can erase duds and create a 'clean' history (in addition to refining your initial prompt-statement). This doesn't seem to be possible in the standard ChatGPT interface, and I find it extremely frustrating.
I use emacs/org-mode, and just integrating gpt into that has made a world of difference in how I use it (gptel.el)! Can highly recommend it.

The outlining features and the ability to quickly zoom in or out of 'branches', as well as being able to filter an entire outline by tag and whatnot, is amazing for controlling the context window and quickly adjusting prompts and whatnot.

And as a bonus, my experience so far is that for at least the simple stuff, it works fine to ask it to answer in org-mode too, or to just be 'aware' of emacs.

Just yesterday I asked it (voice note + speech-to-text) to help me plan some budgeting stuff, and I mused on how adding some coding/tinkering might make it more fun. so GPT decided to provide me with some useful snippets of emacs code to play with.

I do get the impression that I should be careful with giving it 'overhead' like that.

Anyways, can't wait to dive further into your experiences with the robits! Love your work.