Edge 254: InstructGPT is the Model that Inspired the Famous ChatGPT

The model fine tuned GPT-3 to improve its ability to follow instructions.

In recent weeks, the internet has been going crazy with the new ChatGPT model. In general, ChatGPT is part of a series of releases around GPT 3.5 that are highlighting some of the capabilities of the upcoming GPT-4 model. One of the key differences of ChatGPT with previous models is its ability to follow instructions. This is powered another model called InstructGPT which OpenAI quietly unveiled at the beginning of the year.

Large language models like GPT-3 are often used to follow instructions to execute user’s tasks. However, quite often, these models generate toxic or untruthful outputs that are not related to the input instructions. This is mostly due to the fact that models like GPT-3 are trained to predict the next word in a sentence rather than to execute a specific task. This is precisesly the problem OpenAI tried to address with InstructGPT, a language model that builds upon GPT-3 language capabilities but improves it its ability to follow instructions.