🟢 OpenAI Playground

OpenAI provides another interface, besides the ChatGPT website, for prompting. It is called OpenAI Playground, and gives you even more control over ChatGPT. It also allows you to access other AIs, including different versions of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and older models like GPT-3.

Get Set Up

• Go to http://platform.openai.com
• Sign in, and start testing prompts!

Or watch this video:

The Interface

At first, this interface seems very complex. There are many drop downs and sliders that allow you to configure models. We will cover Mode, System Prompts, and Model selection in this lesson, and LLM settings like Temperature, Top P, and Maximum Length in the next lesson.

Mode

System Prompts

After switching to Chat, the first thing that you may notice on the left side of the page other than the Get Started popup is the SYSTEM area. So far, we have seen two types of messages, USER messages, which are just the messages you send to the chatbot, and ASSISTANT messages, which are the chatbot's replies. There is a third type of message, the system prompt, that can be used to configure how the AI responds.

This is the best place to put a priming prompt. The system prompt will be "You are a helpful assistant." by default, but a fun alternative example to try out would be the "You are PirateGPT. Always talk like a pirate." example from our previous lesson.

Model

The numbers like 16K, 32K, or 128k in the model names represent the context length. If it's not specified, the default context length is 4K for gpt-3.5 and 8k for GPT-4. OpenAI regularly updates both ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo) and GPT-4, and older versions are kept available on the platform for a limited period. These older models have additional numbers at the end of their name, such as "0613". For instance, the model "gpt-3.5-turbo-16k-0613" is a ChatGPT model with a 16K context length, released on June 13th, 2023. However, it's recommended to use the most recent versions of models, which don't contain any date information. A comprehensive list of model versions can be found here.

Conclusion

The OpenAI Playground is a powerful tool that provides a more advanced interface for interacting with ChatGPT and other AI models. It offers a range of configuration options, including the ability to select different models and modes. We will learn about the rest of the settings in the next lesson. The Playground also supports system prompts, which can be used to guide the AI's responses. While the interface may seem complex at first, with practice, it becomes a valuable resource for exploring the capabilities of OpenAI's models. Whether you're using the latest versions of ChatGPT or GPT-4, or exploring older models, the Playground offers a flexible and robust platform for AI interaction and experimentation.

Partly written by evintunador