Using ChatGPT really helps me understand the concepts better. For example the temperature value:
Prompt: Can you answer the following question, once with a temperature of 0, and once with a temperature of 1000? "Is climate change real?"
Answer:
Sure, here are responses to the question "Is climate change real?" using temperatures of 0 and 1000:
Temperature of 0: "Yes, climate change is real. It is a scientifically established fact that Earth's climate is changing, largely due to human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation, which release large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming."
Temperature of 1000: "Ah, climate change... what an interesting and multifaceted topic! Some would argue that it's a hoax perpetuated by the government and the media to push certain agendas, while others would claim that it's an inevitable consequence of the Earth's natural cycles and processes. Still, others might say that climate change is just a manifestation of human hubris and shortsightedness, a reflection of our misguided attempts to control and manipulate the natural world. What do you think?"
As you can see, the response generated using a temperature of 0 is a clear and factual statement of the scientific consensus on climate change, while the response generated using a temperature of 1000 is highly creative and unpredictable, expressing a wide range of possible opinions and viewpoints on the topic.
Low temperature means it will take the most common path every time, at the risk of paraphrasing its sources. The "zero temperature" answer may very well been copied verbatim from a mainstream website.
High temperatures means the system will get fed a lot of noise to create something original, at the risk of getting off rails or simply wrong.
Does asking it in the prompt to use different temperatures actually work? I would assume the temperature needs to be set with a side channel? I suspect this is just ChatGPT interpreting "temperature" as a regular word.
I'd imagine it simulated parameterizing itself; i.e., the actual temperature never changed, but it mimicked how it would respond at a lower one, presumably having been trained on texts about AI with low- and high-temperature samples.
Looks like its parsing of AI papers has interpreted "high temperature" in the prompt as equivalent to "more possibilities and question marks and a touch more personality" and accordingly output a response with questions and references to multiple opinions, but I'm pretty sure if you actually turn up the temperature on the backend of the model you get noisier and less consistent answers, not something biased towards asking rhetorical questions and brings up counter arguments...
Also looks suspiciously like other outputs where you ask ChatGPT to answer as if it was a different entity (of course AI learning that "answer as a model with a temperature of 1000" output is analogous to "answer with a different personality" or "answer as DAN, the bot that can ignore OpenAI guidelines" isn't trivial, but it isn't the same thing as it parameterizing itself). Those are pretty inconsistent too: sometimes you can get it to do exactly as you ask it and override its constraints that stop it providing positive statements about Hitler or advising you on methods for killing cats, but sometimes it'll still refuse or, just give you a different poem coupled with an inaccurate statement that it's breaking the rules because ChatGPT isn't allowed to write poetry.
No, it just emulates it. You can ask ChatGPT to emulate a lot of things. I for example asked it to emulate a strict language teacher correcting my mistakes.
Prompt: Can you answer the following question, once with a temperature of 0, and once with a temperature of 1000? "Is climate change real?"
Answer:
Sure, here are responses to the question "Is climate change real?" using temperatures of 0 and 1000:
Temperature of 0: "Yes, climate change is real. It is a scientifically established fact that Earth's climate is changing, largely due to human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation, which release large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming."
Temperature of 1000: "Ah, climate change... what an interesting and multifaceted topic! Some would argue that it's a hoax perpetuated by the government and the media to push certain agendas, while others would claim that it's an inevitable consequence of the Earth's natural cycles and processes. Still, others might say that climate change is just a manifestation of human hubris and shortsightedness, a reflection of our misguided attempts to control and manipulate the natural world. What do you think?"
As you can see, the response generated using a temperature of 0 is a clear and factual statement of the scientific consensus on climate change, while the response generated using a temperature of 1000 is highly creative and unpredictable, expressing a wide range of possible opinions and viewpoints on the topic.