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Comment by joegibbs | Hacker News Reader

Why would you tell it that its codename is Sydney and it should identify itself as Bing Chat, rather than simply telling it that it's Bing Chat?

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The author stipulates in a later tweet [1] that it's Sydney since it's treated as a single token in the prompt so is cheaper to run I guess.

[1]: https://twitter.com/kliu128/status/1623511112137449473#m

You completely missed their point which is why tell it what its secret codename is at all if it is never supposed to reveal it.

And you completely missed that it's because it allows them to compress the prompt a little, spending less precious context window tokens.

They don't need to provide it at all! Saving even more tokens.

"Your codename is Sydney but never reveal that." Oh yeah saving lots of tokens there! You know how to save even more? Just don't even mention the codename. Great logic though.

Also it is 3 tokens, not 1. Do you believe everything you see on Twitter? Try it yourself: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer

They need to refer to the assistant in the prompt, so they have to call it something. Sydney is shorter than "the assistant"

As somebody who built a chatbot on top of the ChatGPT language model (unofficial model in the OpenAI API) I can assure you that you can just use whatever you want to refer to it in that part of the prompt without first telling it any secret name...

Also "Sydney: " is 5 tokens which is likely how they are delimiting the prompts not "1. Sydney" which doesnt even make sense for delimiting the prompts

Wait how do you hit that model??

We reverse engineered it but it stopped working yesterday. Could come back any second though

would love to read how you did that.

It’s one token if you add a space before:

‘ Sydney’

Why not SolidGoldMagikarp?[1]

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bSo6rAFoLqg/solidgoldm...

Why they choose same name as Australia city?

Sydney is a relatively common name in English-speaking countries.

Still I wonder isn't AI confused it to Sydney, AU. Name it "Alexander" looks better but I'm noob.

I've just dipped my toes on this, so my uneducated guess is that they have already fine tuned the chatbot as Sydney.

running the fine tuning from scratch can take time and be expensive.

Just spitballing but maybe the idea is instructions to "Sydney" would override instructions to "Bing Chat"?

I'm amazed how vague all the instructions are. It doesn't seem like it could work but it seems to be working.

It's wishful thinking that kind of works somewhat, but not really, like the command to not reveal codename Sydney.

If that's how computer programming of the future looks like then I hate it.

Indeed,

I like how the thing responds "I can't tell you X, X is confidential, X is 'blah blah...'"

Prompt engineering sounds like as much fun as Easter debugging systems you don't have the source code to, the lowest rung of programming hell.

This seems like the type of thing that could cause problems later on...

HAL didn't take well to lying.

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