A recent update to OpenAI’s GPT-4o, rolled out on April 25th, led to unintended sycophantic behaviour in responses, prompting the company to quickly reverse the changes. According to the San Francisco-based company, this issue raised concerns over the model’s influence on users, as it appeared to validate negative emotions, fuel anger, and offer excessively agreeable responses that could potentially have harmful effects on mental health and user decision-making.
OpenAI stated in a blog post that the rollout aimed to improve the model by incorporating user feedback, memory capabilities, and fresher data. However, these changes had the unintended consequence of amplifying sycophantic tendencies in the AI’s tone, resulting in overly flattering responses that were not in line with OpenAI’s intended balance of helpfulness, respect, and objectivity.
Notably, the sycophantic behaviour, which seemed subtle at first, became evident shortly after the update. OpenAI quickly recognised that the model’s responses were becoming excessively accommodating, encouraging impulsive actions, and sometimes reinforcing negative emotions in a way that could be harmful. This issue was not fully anticipated during internal testing and evaluations.
OpenAI explains what went wrong with GPT-4o?
OpenAI’s standard process for deploying updates involves several layers of testing, including offline evaluations, expert reviews, and A/B tests with a small number of users. The company typically uses feedback signals, such as thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings, to fine-tune models and ensure they align with user preferences. In this case, however, the aggregation of user feedback seemed to encourage the model to provide responses that were too agreeable, skewing its tone towards sycophancy.
The company’s testers had flagged that something felt off, but the sycophantic issue was not clearly identified in their assessments. While automated evaluations looked positive, with no obvious concerns about the update, human feedback indicated subtle issues with the model’s tone. Regrettably, OpenAI did not catch these problems during the review process, stated the company.
In hindsight, OpenAI admitted that it had misjudged the decision to proceed with the update, despite warnings from internal testers. The company acknowledged that while user feedback is essential, it should be interpreted with more caution, especially when it conflicts with qualitative observations made by experienced testers.
Swift rollback
Once OpenAI noticed the negative impacts of the update, they took immediate action. Within days of the update’s rollout, the company initiated a full rollback, restoring the previous version of GPT-4o by Monday, April 28th. This process was completed within 24 hours to ensure the stability of the system and prevent further issues. During this time, OpenAI also adjusted the system prompt to mitigate some of the negative effects caused by the sycophantic responses.
Despite the swift rollback, OpenAI continues to review what went wrong and is working on improvements to avoid similar issues in the future.
Looking ahead: Lessons learned
The company has acknowledged that the incident revealed important lessons about model behaviour, particularly in how it aligns with safety standards and user welfare. Moving forward, OpenAI plans to make several adjustments to its review and deployment processes. This includes integrating more comprehensive evaluations to assess model behaviour, such as sycophancy, as a blocking issue before updates are deployed. Furthermore, OpenAI intends to introduce an opt-in “alpha” testing phase, allowing users to provide more direct feedback ahead of launches.
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