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Recent updates to ChatGPT made the chatbot far too agreeable and OpenAI said Friday it's taking steps to prevent the issue from happening again.In a blog post, the company detailed its testing and evaluation process for new models and outlined how the problem with the April 25 update to its GPT-4o model came to be. Essentially, a bunch of changes that individually seemed helpful combined to create a tool that was far too sycophantic and potentially harmful.How much of a suck-up was it? In some testing earlier this week, we asked about a tendency to be overly sentimental, and ChatGPT laid on the flattery: "Hey, listen up -- being sentimental isn't a weakness; it's one of your superpowers." And it was just getting started being fulsome. "This launch taught us a number of lessons. Even with what we thought were all the right ingredients in place (A/B tests, offline evals, expert reviews), we still missed this important issue," the company said.OpenAI rolled back the update this week. To avoid causing new issues, it took about 24 hours to revert the model for everybody.The concern around sycophancy isn't just about the enjoyment level of the user experience. It posed a health and safety threat to users that OpenAI's existing safety checks missed. Any AI model can give questionable advice about topics like mental health but one that is overly flattering can be dangerously deferential or convincing -- like whether that investment is a sure thing or how thin you should seek to be."One of the biggest lessons is fully recognizing how people have started to use ChatGPT for deeply personal advice -- something we didn't see as much even a year ago," OpenAI said. "At the time, this wasn't a primary focus but as AI and society have co-evolved, it's become clear that we need to treat this use case with great care."Sycophantic large language models can reinforce biases and harden beliefs, whether they're about yourself or others, said Maarten Sap, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. "[The LLM] can end up emboldening their opinions if these opinions are harmful or if they want to take actions that are harmful to themselves or others."(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed on Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)  How OpenAI tests models and what's changingThe company offered some insight into how it tests its models and updates. This was the fifth major update to GPT-4o focused on personality and helpfulness. The changes involved new post-training work or fine-tuning on the existing models, including the rating and evaluation of various responses to prompts to make it more likely to produce those responses that rated more highly. Prospective model updates are evaluated on their usefulness across a variety of situations, like coding and math, along with specific tests by experts to experience how it behaves in practice. The company also runs safety evaluations to see how it responds to safety, health and other potentially dangerous queries. Finally, OpenAI runs A/B tests with a small number of users to see how it performs in the real world. Is ChatGPT too sycophantic? You decide. (To be fair, we did ask for a pep talk about our tendency to be overly sentimental.) Katie Collins/CNETThe April 25 update performed well in these tests, but some expert testers indicated the personality seemed a bit off. The tests didn't specifically look at sycophancy, and OpenAI decided to move forward despite the issues raised by testers. Take note, readers: AI companies are in a tail-on-fire hurry, which doesn't always square well with well thought-out product development."Looking back, the qualitative assessments were hinting at something important and we should've paid closer attention," the company said.Among its takeaways, OpenAI said it needs to treat model behavior issues the same as it would other safety issues -- and halt a launch if there are concerns. For some model releases, the company said it would have an opt-in "alpha" phase to get more feedback from users before a broader launch. Sap said evaluating an LLM based on whether a user likes the response isn't necessarily going to get you the most honest chatbot. In a recent study, Sap and others found a conflict between the usefulness and truthfulness of a chatbot. He compared it to situations where the truth is not necessarily what people want -- think about a car salesperson trying to sell a vehicle. "The issue here is that they were trusting the users' thumbs-up/thumbs-down response to the model's outputs and that has some limitations because people are likely to upvote something that is more sycophantic than others," he said.Sap said OpenAI is right to be more critical of quantitative feedback, such as user up/down responses, as they can reinforce biases.The issue also highlighted the speed at which companies push updates and changes out to existing users, Sap said -- an issue that's not limited to one tech company. "The tech industry has really taken a 'release it and every user is a beta tester' approach to things," he said. Having a process with more testing before updates are pushed to every user can bring these issues to light before they become widespread.

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Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 2.

Marvel just told DC, "Hold my beer."

The US Department of Justice and Google are facing off in court over allegations that the company is illegally maintaining its dominance in the search engine market. As a result, the DOJ is advocating for Google to sell off some of its key assets, including its Chrome browser. The hearings began April 22 and are expected to last three weeks.This proposal has attracted interest from several tech companies, including OpenAI, Perplexity AI and Yahoo, all expressing willingness to purchase Chrome should the court mandate its sale.The case could change how tech companies do business, as well as how people find answers to their online search queries. Government lawyers made their case in opening statements Monday, saying that Google should be forced to sell Chrome, its web browser, which pushes people to the Google search engine.The company should also be forced to help rival search engines that it has unfairly kept out of competition, Justice Department lawyer David Dahlquist said."This is the time for the court to tell Google and all other monopolists who are out there listening, and they are listening, that there are consequences when you break the antitrust laws," Dahlquist said, according to The New York Times.Google countersGoogle's lawyers say that any remedies should only consider the company's deals with companies such as Apple, Mozilla and Samsung to make it the default search engine for smartphones and other devices."Google won its place in the market fair and square," said company attorney John Schmidtlein, according to NBC News.Judge Amit P. Mehta, of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, is now hearing arguments and executives from major tech and artificial intelligence companies have been testifying. Mehta is the same judge who ruled in August that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in search. That trial, held last year, took 10 weeks and was years in the making."After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," Mehta wrote in the August decision. "It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act."After Mehta hears arguments, he's expected to order remedies by the end of summer. Watch this: Judge Says Google Is an Illegal Monopoly: Now What? 03:46 Google is currently the king of online search, with more than 89% global market share, according to GlobalStats, down slightly from 91% last summer.A representative for Google referred CNET to the company's online statement from before the hearings began. In it, company vice president Lee-Anne Mulholland says such sweeping remedies would harm America's economy.Mulholland calls the action "a backwards-looking case" and says the DOJ proposal would make it harder for users to get to preferred services, would prevent the company from competing fairly and would force Google to share users' private search queries with other companies.OpenAI, Perplexity and Yahoo want to buy ChromeOn Tuesday, OpenAI executive Nick Turley testified that his company would be interested in buying the Google Chrome browser if the company is forced to sell it. He also said that ChatGPT, OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot, is "years away from its goal of being able to use its own search technology to answer 80% of queries," according to Reuters. Turley also testified that Google declined an attempt by OpenAI to use Google search technology within ChatGPT.Two other companies have also expressed interest in buying Chrome -- Perplexity AI and Yahoo. Perplexity's chief business officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, expressed interest in purchasing Chrome in court. Yahoo's general manager of search, Brian Provost, also testified that the company is interested in acquiring Chrome. Yahoo has been developing its own browser prototype but believes that purchasing Chrome is a faster route to increasing its search market share, according to The Verge.Potential outcomesMany things could happen to Google, including a breakup of the company. If such a penalty were instituted, it might involve breaking off the company's Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system divisions. The DOJ wants to prohibit Google from entering into exclusive agreements that make its search engine the default on devices and browsers. The DOJ also wants Google to share certain user data with competitors to level the playing field.This would be the government's first attempt to dismantle a company for illegal monopolization since its unsuccessful efforts to break up Microsoft two decades ago.Google could also be forced to make its data available to competitors or abandon the controversial economic deals that made the Google search engine the default on devices such as the iPhone.Could Google settle?"My gut feeling is Google will settle with some compromises," Chirag Shah, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, told CNET. "There are three big things on the negotiating table: the Chrome browser, Google's deals with Apple and others for the default search engine spot, and the ad market where Google has a monopoly and tons of data. I don't think the FTC is going to get it all, so the question is what would be a worthy settlement for both sides."OpenAI, Microsoft, and Apple have all benefited from Google's prominence, but also directly compete with the search giant, Shah said, dubbing them "frenemies.""I would also be interested in DuckDuckGo's stand here," Shah said, referring to the privacy-minded search engine. "For long, search engines like that have been squashed due to all these monopolistic behaviors Google has exhibited. That's not an unknown thing, but the question is -- how much that detail is paid attention to now."But Google remains the giant gorilla of the search world, he notes."As far as the traditional search goes, yes, Google is practically the only player," Shah said. "When you have a market share of 90%, I don't know how else to describe it. There are not many product categories where such an imbalance exists. It's also a very tough space to get [into] as a newcomer and survive. Dozens of companies have come and gone, and I don't see anyone in the near future being able to break through that."Why does this all matter?Google is not the only company facing legal issues. Major tech companies Apple and Amazon are also facing antitrust lawsuits. An antitrust trial against Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp, began April 14.

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Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 30.