[binarymax]

You need to model how a person actually plays connections. Start with the most obvious group that has the least ambiguity, and then your problem space is smaller on category 2, then the same for category 3 and 4.

So really you could fine tune 3 models - one for 16 words, one for 12, and one for 8. Then use them in succession.

Also, if you come across a mistake at the end (have some negative examples in the training sets), tell it to start over and add to the prompt what you think is NOT a group.

[thomasahle]

It might even be easier to pick an arbitrary word, and ask it to find the three that matches it.

Asking GPT to just pick any group, adds a lot of extra "mental overhead".

Though of course this works best if all the groups are roughly of the same difficulty.

[SamBam]

Connections is deliberately written so that any one word might belong to multiple groups. For example, the word "Bass" might be surrounded by "Guitar," "Drums," and "Microphone," but actually belongs to a category of "Fish," while "Guitar" might belong to the category "Air ___," and "Microphone" might belong to "Something that can be dropped."

Just making up that example, but it's very common that multiple words will all appear to be one group, and actually each one belongs to a different group.