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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

#131

Post by brookst »

Terr_ wrote: post #102
brookst wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems as fruitful as debating whether my car brought me to work today because some connotations of “bring” include volition.

Except with an important difference: There aren't a bunch of people out there busy claiming their cars literally have volition . If people start doing that, it changes the stakes, and "bringing" stops being a safe metaphor that everyone collectively understands is figurative.

Nobody’s* claiming that. People are being imprecise with language and others are imagining the claim and reacting.

* ok someone somewhere is but nobody in this conversation

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

#132

Post by WithinReason »

GaggiX wrote: post #86
WithinReason wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to include the prompt in every query, which makes it very expensive

The prompt is kv-cached, it's precomputed.

Good point, but it still increases the compute of all subsequent tokens

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

#133

Post by spywaregorilla »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #73
spywaregorilla wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence to suggest the engineers believed that?

The original founders realised the weakness of Siri and started a machine learning based assistent which they sold to Samsung. Apple could have taken the same route but didn't.

So you're saying the engineers were totally grounded and apple business leadership was not.

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

#134

Post by creatonez »

Notably, this prompt is making "hallucinations" an officially recognized phenomenon:

> If Claude is asked about a very obscure person, object, or topic, i.e. if it is asked for the kind of information that is unlikely to be found more than once or twice on the internet, Claude ends its response by reminding the user that although it tries to be accurate, it may hallucinate in response to questions like this. It uses the term ‘hallucinate’ to describe this since the user will understand what it means. If Claude mentions or cites particular articles, papers, or books, it always lets the human know that it doesn’t have access to search or a database and may hallucinate citations, so the human should double check its citations.

Probably for the best that users see the words "Sorry, I hallucinated" every now and then.

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

#135

Post by usaar333 »

digging wrote: post #106
_fuchs wrote: post #2

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

Odd how many of those instructions are almost always ignored (eg. "don't apologize," "don't explain code without being asked"). What is even the point of these system prompts if they're so weak?

It lowers the probability. It's well known LLMs have imperfect reliability at following instructions -- part of the reason "agent" projects so far have not succeeded.

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

#136

Post by usaar333 »

ithkuil wrote: post #24
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.)

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! "

LLMs are extremely good at translation, given that the transformer was literally built for that.

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

#137

Post by [deleted] »

criddell wrote: post #78
Terr_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM Prompt Engineering: Injecting your own arbitrary data into a what is ultimately an undifferentiated input stream of word-tokens from no particular source, hoping your sequence will be most influential in the dream-generator output, compared to a sequence placed there by another person, or a sequence that they indirectly caused the system to emit that then got injected back into itself. Then play whack-a-mole unti…

It probably shouldn't be called prompt engineering , even informally. The work of an engineer shouldn't require hope .

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by dwallin »

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

Searle's argument in the Chinese Room is horribly flawed. It treats the algorithm and the machine it runs on as the same thing. Just because a human brain embeds the algorithm within the hardware doesn't mean they are interchangeable.

In the Chinese Room, the human is operating as computing hardware (and just a subset of it, the room itself is substantial part of the machine). The algorithm being run is itself is the source of any understanding. The human not internalizing the algorithm is entirely unrelated. The human contains a bunch of unrelated machinery that was not being utilized by the room algorithm. They are not a superset of the original algorithm and not even a proper subset.

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

#139

Post by handsclean »

digging wrote: post #106
_fuchs wrote: post #2

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

Odd how many of those instructions are almost always ignored (eg. "don't apologize," "don't explain code without being asked"). What is even the point of these system prompts if they're so weak?

I’ve previously noticed that Claude is far less apologetic and more assertive when refusing requests compared to other AIs. I think the answer is as simple as being ok with just making it more that way, not completely that way. The section on pretending not to recognize faces implies they’d take a much more extensive approach if really aiming to make something never happen.

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

#140

Post by ImHereToVote »

ljlolel wrote: post #58
Terr_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM Prompt Engineering: Injecting your own arbitrary data into a what is ultimately an undifferentiated input stream of word-tokens from no particular source, hoping your sequence will be most influential in the dream-generator output, compared to a sequence placed there by another person, or a sequence that they indirectly caused the system to emit that then got injected back into itself. Then play whack-a-mole unti…

same as with asking humans to do something

When we do prompt engineering for humans, we use the term Public Relations.
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