Yeah I think you're right on about the students not being able to afford GPT4 (I don't blame them. The API version gets expensive quick). I agree though that it doesn't seem super well put together.

GPT4 with reflexion prompting gets 90% correct (for HumanEval coding benchmark). The paper this is based on is misleading at best.

Oh ok! Got it. I read it as you saying ChatGPT doesn't use GPT 4. It's still unclear what they used for part of it because of the bit before the part you quoted:

For each of the 517 SO questions, the first two authors manually used the SO question’s title, body, and tags to form one question prompt3 and fed that to the Chat Interface [45] of ChatGPT.

It doesn't say if it's 4 or 3.5, but I'm going to assume 3.5. Anyway, in the end they got the same result for GPT 3.5 that it gets on HumanEval, which isn't anything interesting. Also, GPT 4 is much better, so I'm not really sure what the point is. Their stuff on the analysis of the language used in the questions was pretty interesting though.

Also, thanks for finding their mention of 3.5. I missed that in my skim through obviously.

If we are talking Copilot then that's not ChatGPT. But I agree it's ok. Like it can do simple things well but I go to GPT 4 for the hard stuff. (Or my own brain haha)

Hmm that's incorrect. ChatGPT (if you pay for it) does both.

Wait a second here... I skimmed the paper and GitHub and didn't find an answer to a very important question: is this GPT3.5 or 4? There's a huge difference in code quality between the two and either they made a giant accidental omission or they are being intentionally misleading. Please correct me if I missed where they specified that. I'm assuming they were using GPT3.5, so yeah those results would be as expected. On the HumanEval benchmark, GPT4 gets 67% and that goes up to 90% with reflexion prompting. GPT3.5 gets 48.1%, which is exactly what this paper is saying. (source).

You should check out the short story Manna. It's maybe a bit dated now but explores what could go wrong with that sort of thing.