Does "system" message do anything for Davinci? Or only GPT?

I cant seem to find much info on the “system” message in the openai docs so if anyone has a link to it, please share. I’ve searched all the various phrases I can think of.

Question: I am new to openai so this may be a dumb question, but does the “system” message do anything for the pre-GPT models (Davinci, etc) or is it only really useful for GPT?

there are no “pre-GPT” models, everything is GPT.

You probably mean “chat gpt”, and yes, the roles (user/assistant/system) are only used with the chat models.

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@nunodonato - Thank you for the correction and the answer!

Hi @ryan8,

In your case your probably looking more in the direction of Fine-tuning, https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/fine-tuning/fine-tuning this would be the option to influence the output generated by Davinci etc., but is a bit more complicated.

regarding documentation: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/chat/instructing-chat-models (Refer to the section “Instructing chat models” - it is a bit thin but gives you the overview on how to give instructions.

Here are some examples on how this can work out: