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Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

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Re: Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

#41

Post by perforator »

trevyn wrote: post #17
daghamm wrote: post #6

These seem rather long. Do they count against my tokens for each conversation? One thing I have been missing in both chatgpt and Claude is the ability to exclude some part of the conversation or branch into two parts, in order to reduce the input size. Given how quickly they run out of steam, I think this could be an easy hack to improve performance and accuracy in long conversations.

> Do they count against my tokens for each conversation? This is for the Claude app, which is not billed in tokens, not the API.

It still imposes usage limits. I assume it is based on tokens as it gives your a warning that long conversations use up the limits faster.

Re: Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

#42

Post by aden1ne »

nilsherzig wrote: post #39
ithkuil wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed the understanding part is very good. I just tried this: " I'm dykslegsik I offen Hawe problems wih sreach ennginnes bat eye think yoy wiw undrestand my " Gpt-4o replied: " I understand you perfectly! If you have trouble with search engines or anything else, feel free to ask me directly, and I'll do my best to help you. Just let me know what you're looking for or what you need assistance with! "

Sonnet 3.5 > I understand that you're telling me you're dyslexic and often have problems with search engines, but you think I will understand you. You're right - I can understand what you're trying to communicate despite the spelling differences. Is there something specific I can help you with today? I'm happy to assist in any way I can. Honestly it has a much nicer writing style than chatgpt. I really dislike openai…

This is one of the reasons why I'm paying for Claude and not for ChatGPT. ChatGPT really goes into uncanny valley for me.

Re: Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

#43

Post by cubefox »

nilsherzig wrote: post #39
ithkuil wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed the understanding part is very good. I just tried this: " I'm dykslegsik I offen Hawe problems wih sreach ennginnes bat eye think yoy wiw undrestand my " Gpt-4o replied: " I understand you perfectly! If you have trouble with search engines or anything else, feel free to ask me directly, and I'll do my best to help you. Just let me know what you're looking for or what you need assistance with! "

Sonnet 3.5 > I understand that you're telling me you're dyslexic and often have problems with search engines, but you think I will understand you. You're right - I can understand what you're trying to communicate despite the spelling differences. Is there something specific I can help you with today? I'm happy to assist in any way I can. Honestly it has a much nicer writing style than chatgpt. I really dislike openai…

Claude seems to have a stronger tendency for sycophancy sometimes, e.g. when pointing out minor mistakes it made.

Re: Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

#44

Post by cubefox »

Terr_ wrote: post #27
cubefox wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And "kinda" is an understatement. It understands you very well, perhaps even better than the average human would. (Average humans often don't understand jargon.)

> It understands you very well No, it creates output that intuitively feels like like it understands you very well, until you press it in ways that pop the illusion. To truly conclude it understands things, one needs to show some internal cause and effect, to disprove a Chinese Room scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

> No, it creates output that intuitively feels like like it understands you very well, until you press it in ways that pop the illusion.

I would say even a foundation model, without supervised instruction tuning, and without RLHF, understands text quite well. It just predicts the most likely continuation of the prompt, but to do so effectively, it arguably has to understand what the text means.

Re: Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

#45

Post by lynx23 »

Terr_ wrote: post #27
cubefox wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And "kinda" is an understatement. It understands you very well, perhaps even better than the average human would. (Average humans often don't understand jargon.)

> It understands you very well No, it creates output that intuitively feels like like it understands you very well, until you press it in ways that pop the illusion. To truly conclude it understands things, one needs to show some internal cause and effect, to disprove a Chinese Room scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

I submit humans are no different. It can take years of seemingly good communication with a human til you finally realize they never really got your point of view. Language is ambigious and only a tool to communicate thoughts. The underlying essence, thought, is so much more complex that language is always just a rather weak approxmiation.

Re: Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

#46

Post by ano-ther »

This makes me so happy as I find the pseudo-conversational tone of other GPTs quite off-putting.

> Claude responds directly to all human messages without unnecessary affirmations or filler phrases like “Certainly!”, “Of course!”, “Absolutely!”, “Great!”, “Sure!”, etc. Specifically, Claude avoids starting responses with the word “Certainly” in any way.

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts

Re: Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

#47

Post by adwn »

Terr_ wrote: post #37
xscott wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do random people you meet in the grocery store measure-up with this standard?

Well, your own mind axiomatically works, and we can safely assume the beings you meet in the grocery store have minds like it which have the same capabilities and operate on cause-and-effect principles that are known (however imperfectly) to medical and psychological science. (If you think those shoppers might be hollow shells controlled by a remote black box, ask your doctor about Capgras Delusion. [0]) Plus they do…

> nor do they respond "Sorry, you're right, 1+1=3, my mistake" without some discernible reason.

Look up the Asch conformity experiment [1]. Quite a few people will actually give in to "1+1=3" if all the other people in the room say so.

It's not exactly the same as LLM hallucinations, but humans aren't completely immune to this phenomenon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments#Me...

Re: Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

#48

Post by miki123211 »

zevv wrote: post #28
atorodius wrote: post #3

Personally still amazed that we live in a time where we can tell a computer system in pure text how it should behave and it _kinda_ works

It actually still scares the hell out of me that this is the way even the experts 'program' this technology, with all the ambiguities rising from the use of natural language.

Keep in mind that this is not the only way the experts program this technology.

There's plenty of fine-tuning and RLHF involved too, that's mostly how "model alignment" works for example.

The system prompt exists merely as an extra precaution to reinforce the behaviors learned in RLHF, to explain some subtleties that would be otherwise hard to learn, and to fix little mistakes that remain after fine-tuning.

You can verify that this is true by using the model through the API, where you can set a custom system prompt. Even if your prompt is very short, most behaviors still remain pretty similar.

There's an interesting X thread from the researchers at Anthropic on why their prompt is the way it is at [1][2].

[1] https://twitter.com/AmandaAskell/status/1765207842993434880?...

[2] and for those without an X account, https://nitter.poast.org/AmandaAskell/status/176520784299343...

Re: Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

#49

Post by blooalien »

lynx23 wrote: post #45
Terr_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It understands you very well No, it creates output that intuitively feels like like it understands you very well, until you press it in ways that pop the illusion. To truly conclude it understands things, one needs to show some internal cause and effect, to disprove a Chinese Room scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

I submit humans are no different. It can take years of seemingly good communication with a human til you finally realize they never really got your point of view. Language is ambigious and only a tool to communicate thoughts. The underlying essence, thought, is so much more complex that language is always just a rather weak approxmiation.

The difference is that large language models don't think at all. They just string language "tokens" together using fancy math and statistics and spew them out in response to the tokens they're given as "input". I realize that they're quite convincing about it, but they're still not doing at all what most people think they're doing.

Re: Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

#50

Post by blooalien »

throwup238 wrote: post #23
dtx1 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost more amazing that it only kinda sorta works and doesn't go all HAL 9000 on us by being super literal.

Wait till you give it control over life support!

> Wait till you give it control over life support!

That right there is the part that scares the hell outta me. Not the "AI" itself, but how humans are gonna misuse it and plug it into things it's totally not designed for and end up givin' it control over things it should never have control over. Seeing how many folks readily give in to mistaken beliefs that it's something much more than it actually is, I can tell it's only a matter of time before that leads to some really bad decisions made by humans as to what to wire "AI" up to or use it for.

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