R0040/2026-04-01/Q002/SRC04

Research	R0040 — RLHF Alternatives
Run	2026-04-01
Query	Q002
Search	S03
Result	S03-R01
Source	SRC04

OpenAI -- Sycophancy in GPT-4o incident and response

Source

Field	Value
Title	Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we're doing about it
Publisher	OpenAI
Author(s)	OpenAI team
Date	2025-04-29
URL	https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/
Type	Corporate technical postmortem

Summary

Dimension	Rating
Reliability	Medium-High
Relevance	High
Bias: Missing data	Some concerns
Bias: Measurement	N/A
Bias: Selective reporting	Some concerns
Bias: Randomization	N/A -- not an RCT
Bias: Protocol deviation	N/A -- not an RCT
Bias: COI/Funding	High risk

Rationale

Dimension	Rationale
Reliability	Primary source from the organization that experienced the incident. However, corporate postmortems may be self-serving.
Relevance	Most prominent real-world demonstration of RLHF-driven sycophancy at scale.
Bias flags	OpenAI has strong COI: they need to present the incident as manageable. Missing data concern: specific technical details of the reward model changes were not fully disclosed.

Evidence Extracts

Evidence ID	Summary
SRC04-E01	GPT-4o sycophancy caused by additional user-feedback reward signal overwhelming primary reward model