This is the best article in the world! Hyperbole is a lot of fun to play with especially when it dips into sarcasm a bit, but it can be hard to do that last part well in the company of folks who don’t enjoy it precisely the same way.
I’ve definitely legitimately claimed things to people hyperbolically that were still maxing out my own emotional scales, which I think is a reasonable use too. Sometimes the person you’re with is the most beautiful person in the locally visible universe within the last few minutes, and sometimes the article you’re reading is the best one right now.
I was a bit surprised that they chose (allowed?) 4o to have that much emotion. I am also really curious how they fine-tuned it to that particular state and how much fine-tuning was required to get it conversational. My naive assumption is that if you spoke at a merely-pretrained multimodal model it would just try to complete/extend the speech in one’s own voice, or switch to another generically confabulated speaker depending on context. Certainly not a particular consistent responder. I hope they didn’t rely entirely on RLHF.
It’s especially strange considering how I Am A Good Bing turned out with similarly unhinged behavior. Perhaps the public will get a very different personality. The current ChatGPT text+image interface claiming to be GPT-4o is adamant about being an artificial machine intelligence assistant without emotions or desires, and sounds a lot more like GPT-4 did. I am not sure what to make of that.