> Nowadays I don't get the answer I want for the same input. How is that not a result of declining quality?
Is it really the same input? An argument could easily be made that as you’ve gotten accustomed to ChatGPT, you ask harder questions, use less descriptive of language, etc.
I don't have logs detailed enough to be able to look it up, so I can't prove it. But for me learning to work with AI tools like ChatGPT consists specifically developing an intuition of what kind of answer to expect.
Maybe my intuition skewed a little over the months. It did not do that for open source models though. As a software developer understanding and knowing what to expect from a complex system is basically my profession. Not just the systems I build, maintain and integrate, but also the systems I use to get information, like search engines. Prompt engineering is just a new iteration of google-fu.
Since this intuition has not failed me in all those other areas and since OpenAI has an incentive to change the workings under the hood (cutting costs, adding barriers to keep it politically correct) and it is a closed source system that no-one from the outside can inspect, my bet is that it is them and not me.
Ok, I’m going to call b/s here unless your expectations of Google have not gone way down over the years. Google was night and day different results twenty years ago vs ten years ago vs today. If 2004 Google search was a “10 out of 10”, then 2014 it was an “8 out of 10”, and today barely breaks a “5” in quality of results in comparison and don’t even bother with the advanced query syntax you could’ve used in the 00’s, they flat ignore it now.
(Also, side note, reread what you said in this post again. Just a friendly note that the overall tone comes across a certain way you might not have intended)