While I’m far from a subject expert on LLMs, Lynch’s explanations sound fairly convincing — and at least 2,300 who like the post probably agree. However, the winter break hypothesis has its own critics, as another researcher, Ian Arawjo, responded that they could not reproduce the same results, and the comparison between queries labeled for May and December was too small to be noticed by users.
Meanwhile, there has been no update from OpenAI or CEO Sam Altman on X about the issue, even though both accounts can otherwise be seen posting actively. Amid ChatGPT’s lazy-loading issues, the company went through a brief upheaval, with Altman temporarily being ousted from his position as the CEO, being hired by Microsoft, and then re-hired as OpenAI’s CEO – in less than a week, while the majority of the OpenAI workforce threatened to mass-resign as a protest.
Perhaps, despite all the facade, there is still a power tussle inside the company, preventing it from fixing the issue. Or perhaps, the team is taking a well-deserved break after a year crammed with mentions of AI in almost every marketing and sales deck, tech podcast, or YouTube video — even in the Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2023.
