Gpt-3.5-turbo which has been optimized for chat but works well for traditional completions tasks as well

Just a quick question, on this page in this sentence “gpt-3.5-turbo which has been optimized for chat but works well for traditional completions tasks as well”, what does " traditional completions tasks" mean?

In the OpenAI Playground you will see that there are multiple modes to choose from. Specifically, Chat & Complete (Completion).

Before GPT3.5-Turbo was released for the API there was

  • No forced structure (ChatML)
  • Sibling competitive InstructGPT (iGPT) models such as text-davinci-003

Davinci is/was wonderful for being straight-to-the-point, and not exclusively used as a conversational agent. It traditionally was very useful for task completion, in comparison to cGPT.

Since then, (API) GPT-3.5-turbo, ChatML, and GPT-4 has been released, and nothing has been done with the former iGPT models. So they are (relatively) overpriced, and under-performing.

So, to answer your question: Traditional completion tasks refers to using iGPT models, as they are/were meant for traditional instruction following, rather than being a conversational agent.