Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

For reference, a single NVIDIA H200 card has a TDP of 700watts. Considering all the middlemen you put between you and the model, .14KWh doesn't look too outrageous to me. Because you add processors, high-speed interconnects, tons of cooling, etc. into the mix. Plus the models you run at the datacenters are way bigger.

For "fathomability" case, the network cables (fibers in fact) you use in that datacenters carries 800gbps, and the fiber-copper interface converters at each end heats up to uncomfortable levels. You have thousands of these just converting packets to light and vice versa. I'm not adding the power consumption of the switches, servers, cooling infra, etc. into the mix.

Yes, water cooling is more efficient than air cooling, but when a server is burning through 6KWh of energy (8x Tesla cards, plus processors, plus rest of the system), nothing is efficient as a local model you hit at your computer.

Disclosure: Sitting on top of a datacenter.

Here's a thought: why don't YOU shut up? /s

Sorry! That was mean, but I hope it came across as funny.

In all seriousness, I like the question, and your implication is intuitive: if we (as individuals) talk to machines rudely, it's likely to (at minimum) lead us to be ruder to other humans, if only by habit. And if they're expecting more politeness than we're showing, they may infer the intent to be rude, and react accordingly. Those who are rude would end up being worse off.

That said, it's the Fallacy of Composition to assume that if everyone gets ruder the collective effect would be the same as the individual effect. We have different requirements for what counts as "polite" in different cultures but everyone seems to get along pretty well. Maybe societies can all get ruder (and just get along worse with each other) but also maybe they can't.

I tried looking in the literature but this book implies we don't even know how to measure politeness differences between languages: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=MPeieAeP1DQC&oi=...

There are even theories that politesse can lead to aggression: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2695863

Deborah Tannen (the linguist) has found many examples where different politeness expectations (particularly across the cultural divide that aligns with gender) can lead to conflict, but it always seems to involve misunderstandings due to expectations: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YJ-wDp7CJYAC&oi=...

So yeah, bad outcomes feel intuitive but I don't think linguistics or sociology has a theory of what happens if a group collectively gets less polite.

No, f* them.

Seriously, it feels really weird to thanks a LLM. Like, did you ever thanks `sed`, `bash` or `firefox`? What's the difference?

My respect is precious and meaningful, and just as I don't give it to a CLI or an OS, I won't give it to an LLM.

It feels like a disrespect to every people I respect to also respect a machine. That doesn't mean I have to be rude though, as in my first sentence.

... cos, I mean, what's the difference between ai and a barista? Both are basically inanimate emotion-free zones, right?

I think people in general are not all that great at doing this.

Anecdotal, but I grew up in a small town in rural New England, a few hours from NYC and popular with weekenders and second-home owners from there. I don’t think that people from NYC are inherently rude, but there’s a turbulence to life in NYC to where jockeying for position is somewhat of a necessity. It was, however, transparently obvious in my hometown that people from the city were unable to turn it off when they arrived. Ostensibly they had some interest in the slow-paced, pastoral village life, but they were readily identifiable as the only people being outwardly pushy and aggressive in daily interactions. I’ve lived in NYC for some time now, and I recognize the other side of this, and feel it stemmed less from inherent traits and more from an inability to context switch behavior.