“GPT-4o Sycophancy Post Mortem” by Zvi

Last week I covered that GPT-4o was briefly an (even more than usually) absurd sycophant, and how OpenAI responded to that.

Their explanation at that time was paper thin. It didn’t tell us much that we did not already know, and seemed to suggest they had learned little from the incident.

Rolling Stone has a write-up of some of the people whose delusions got reinforced by ChatGPT, which has been going on for a while – this sycophancy incident made things way worse but the pattern isn’t new. Here's some highlights, but the whole thing is wild anecdotes throughout, and they point to a ChatGPT induced psychosis thread on Reddit. I would love to know how often this actually happens.

Table of Contents

1. There's An Explanation For (Some Of) This.
2. What Have We Learned?
3. What About o3 The Lying Liar?
4. o3 [...]

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Outline:

(00:51) There's An Explanation For (Some Of) This

(02:50) What Have We Learned?

(10:09) What About o3 The Lying Liar?

(12:21) o3 The Source Fabricator

(14:25) There Is Still A Lot We Don't Know

(20:43) You Must Understand The Logos

(25:17) Circling Back

(28:11) The Good News

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First published:
May 5th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KyndnEA7NMFrDKtJG/gpt-4o-sycophancy-post-mortem

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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