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Predicting the future with the past
There’s a new prompting technique to get ChatGPT to do what it hates doing the most — predict the future.
New research suggests the best way to get accurate predictions from ChatGPT is to prompt it to tell a story set in the future, looking back on events that haven’t happened yet.
The researchers evaluated 100 different prompts, split between direct predictions (who will win best actor at the 2022 Oscars) versus “future narratives,” such as asking the chatbot to write a story about a family watching the 2022 Oscars on TV and describe the scene as the presenter reads out the best actor winner.
The story produced more accurate results — similarly, the best way to get a good forecast on interest rates was to get the model to produce a story about Fed Chair Jerome Powell looking back on past events. Redditors tried this technique out, and it suggested an interest rate hike in June and a financial crisis in 2030.
Theoretically, that should mean if you ask ChatGPT to write a Cointelegraph news story set in 2025, looking back on this year’s big Bitcoin price moves, it would return a more accurate price forecast than just asking it for a prediction.
There are two potential issues with the research, though: the researchers chose the 2022 Oscars as they knew who won, but ChatGPT shouldn’t, as its training data ran out in September 2021. However, there are plenty of examples of ChatGPT producing information it “shouldn’t” know from the training data.
Another issue is that OpenAI appears to have deliberately borked ChatGPT predictive responses, so this technique might simply be a jailbreak.
Related research found the best way to get LLama2 to solve 50 math problems was to…
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