The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

Summary

# Also in March, OpenAI launched the "GPT-4o native multimodal image generation’ feature they had been promising us for a year. This was one of the most successful product launches of all time. They signed up 100 million new user accounts in a week! They had a single hour where they signed up a million new accounts, as this thing kept on going viral again and again and again. I took a photo of my dog, Cleo, and told it to dress her in a pelican costume, obviously. But look at what it did—it added a big, ugly sign in the background saying Half Moon Bay. I didn’t ask for that. My artistic vision has been completely compromised! This was my first encounter with ChatGPT’s new memory feature, where it consults pieces of your previous conversation history without you asking it to. I told it off and it gave me the pelican dog costume that I really wanted. But this was a warning that we risk losing control of the context. As a power user of these tools, I want to stay in complete control of what the inputs are. Features like ChatGPT memory are taking that control away from me. I don’t like them. I turned it off. I wrote more about this in I really don’t like ChatGPT’s new memory dossier.