The OpenAI API is powered by GPT-3 language models which can be coaxed to perform natural language tasks using carefully engineered text prompts. But these models can also generate outputs that are untruthful, toxic, or reflect harmful sentiments. This is in part because GPT-3 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. In other words, these models aren’t aligned with their users.

The InstructGPT models are much better at following instructions than GPT-3. They also make up facts less often, and show small decreases in toxic output generation. Our labelers prefer outputs from our 1.3B InstructGPT model over outputs from a 175B GPT-3 model, despite having more than 100x fewer parameters.

Source: https://openai.com/blog/instruction-following/#guide