OpenAI has silently unveiled “gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct,” a new instruction language model designed for giving specific instructions efficiently, similar to the chat-focused GPT-3.5 Turbo.

This new model will replace existing Instruct models and certain text-based models. It maintains the same cost and performance as other GPT-3.5 models within a 4K context window, using training data up to September 2021.

Compared to GPT-3.5, gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct is not a chat model. Instead, it excels in directly answering questions and completing text tasks swiftly, aligning with its purpose of following instructions effectively.

OpenAI emphasizes that GPT-4 surpasses GPT-3.5 in comprehending complex instructions, generating higher-quality output, and doing so at a faster pace and a lower cost.

Instruct models, including this new release, are a crucial foundation for the breakthroughs seen in ChatGPT, based on continual refinement through human feedback during and after pre-training. These models are known for better understanding and responding to human queries with fewer errors and less harmful content, making them preferred even when significantly smaller in parameters than regular GPT models.

In January, OpenAI had released the instruct GPT models which was intended to reduce hallucinations and coax the model to produce more ‘truthful’ and less toxic responses. GPT-3 already did this because they explained that “it is trained to predict the next word on a large dataset of Internet text, rather than to safely perform the language task that the user wants.” The model wasn’t aligned with the users and often made up facts which was combated by InstructGPT. 

The main difference between the new update and the older version is that GPT 3.5 turbo instead of being conversational, will ‘instruct’ in a more task-oriented manner rather than a conversational one. The model will not be ‘chatty’ and it will follow instructions without requiring additional prompting techniques.