I don’t see this as an American thing. It’s an extension of the current Product Management trend to give software quirky and friendly personality.
You can see the trend in more than LLM output. It’s in their desktop app that has “Good Morning” and other prominent greetings. Claude Code has quirky status output like “Bamboozling” and “Noodling”.
It’s a theme throughout their product design choices. I’ve worked with enough trend-following product managers to recognize this trend toward infusing express personality into software to recognize it.
For what it’s worth, the Americans I know don’t find it as cute or lovable as intended. It feels fake and like an attempt to play at emotions.
Ah, Genuine People Personalities from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
> It’s in their desktop app that has “Good Morning” and other prominent greetings. Claude Code has quirky status output like “Bamboozling” and “Noodling”.
This reminded me of a critique of UNIX that, unlike DOS, ls doesn't output anything when there are no files. DOS's dir command literally tells you there are no files, and this was considered, in this critique, to be more polite and friendly and less confusing than UNIX. Of course, there's the adage "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all", and if you consider "no files found" to not be nice (because it is negative and says "no"), then ls is actually being polite(r) by not printing anything.
Many people interact with computers in a conversational manner and have anthropomorphized them for decades. This is probably influenced by computers being big, foreign, scary things to many people, so making them have a softer, more handholding "personality" makes them more accessible and acceptable. This may be less important these days as computers are more ubiquitous and accessible, but the trend lives on.
We don't appreciate how much there is to language.
It might be the case that it makes the technology far more approachable. Or it makes them feel far less silly for sharing personal thoughts and opinions with the machine. Or it makes them feel validated.
This can’t possibly be true, can it? Every language must have its own nuance. non native English speakers might not grasp the nuance of English language, but the same could be said for any one speaking another language.
It's as simple as that. Most people do not expect to interact the way that most native English speakers expect.
Yes they need to "try a completely different approach"
As people here are saying, you quickly learn to not ask leading questions, just assume that its first take is pretty optimal and perhaps present it with some options if you want to change something.
There are times when it will actually say I'm not right though. But the balance is off.
These systems are still wrong so often that a large amount of distrust is necessary to use them sensibly.
A brilliant observation, Dr. Watson! Indeed, the merit of an inquiry or an assertion lies not in its mere utterance but in the precision of its intent and the clarity of its reasoning!
One may pose dozens of questions and utter scores of statements, yet until each is finely honed by observation and tempered by logic, they must remain but idle chatter. It is only through genuine quality of thought that a question may be elevated to excellence, or a remark to brilliance.
Wow, this is really interesting. I had no idea Japan, for example, had such a focus on blunt, direct communication. Can you share your clearly extensive research in this area so I can read up on this?
I have only spent about a year in the US, but to me the difference was stark from what I'm used to in Europe. As an example, I've never encountered a single shop cashier who didn't talk to me. Everyone had something to say, usually a variation of How's it going?. Contrasting this to my native Estonia, where I'd say at least 90% of my interactions with cashiers involves them not making a single sound. Not even in response to me saying hello, or to state the total sum. If they're depressed or in an otherwise non-euphoric mood, they make no attempt to fake it. I'm personally fine with it, because I don't go looking for social connections from cashiers. Also, when they do talk to me in a happy manner, I know it's genuine.
Does it translate into people wanting sycophantic chat bots? Maybe, but I don't know a single American that actually likes when llms act that way.
Politeness makes sense as an adaptation to low social trust. You have no way of knowing whether others will behave in mutually beneficial ways, so heavy standards of social interaction evolve to compensate and reduce risk. When it's taken to an excess, as it probably is in the U.S. (compared to most other developed countries) it just becomes grating for everyone involved. It's why public-facing workers invariably complain about the draining "emotional labor" they have to perform - a term that literally doesn't exist in most of the world!
Service industry in America is a different story that could use a lot of improvement.
Or is carrying a gun...
Let me guess, you consider yourself a progressive left democrat.
Do I have any source for that? No, but I noticed a pattern where progressive left democrats ask for a source to discredit something that is clearly a personal observation or opinion, and by its nature doesn't require any sources.
The only correct answer is: it's an opinion, accept it or refute it yourself, you don't need external validation to participate in an argument. Or maybe you need ;)
I don't, and your comment is a mockery of itself.
> Claude never starts its response by saying a question or idea or observation was good, great, fascinating, profound, excellent, or any other positive adjective. It skips the flattery and responds directly.
Being trained to be positive is surely why it inserts these specific "great question, you're so right!" remarks, but if you wasn't trained on that, it still couldn't tell you whether you're great or not
> I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses
The American faux friendliness is not what causes the underlying problem here, so all else being equal, they might as well have it kiss your ass. It's what most English speakers expect from a "friendly assistant" after all
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1703980800&dateRange=custom&...
Because I thought chain of thought made for reasoning. And the first google result for 'chain of thought versus reasoning models' says it does: https://medium.com/@mayadakhatib/the-era-of-reasoning-models...
Give me a better source.
CoT produces the linguistic scaffolding for reasoning, but doesn't actually provide much accuracy in doing so.
e.g. https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/maximize-robotics-performa...
It says that reasoning models "now aim for" more, but that doesn't disqualify the older more basic techniques.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to learn from your link because there's so much vision stuff happening here and that's the focus of the article. Can you link me something about what you need to make a bare minimum reasoning LLM? Text only.
Doing a web search on the topic just comes up with marketing materials. Even Wikipedia's "Reasoning language model" article is mostly a list of release dates and model names, with as only relevant-sounding remark as to how these models are different: "[LLMs] can be fine-tuned on a dataset of reasoning tasks paired with example solutions and step-by-step (reasoning) traces. The fine-tuned model can then produce its own reasoning traces for new problems." It sounds like just another dataset: more examples, more training, in particular on worked examples where this "think step by step" method is being demonstrated with known-good steps and values. I don't see how that fundamentally changes how it works; you're saying such models do not predict the most likely token for a given context anymore, that there is some fundamentally different reasoning process going on somewhere?
Actual reasoning requires training on diverse data sources, as you noted, but also coached experimentation (supervised fine-tuning) not just adding "think step by step" instruction to a model trained on typical textual datasets. "Think step by step" came first and produced increased performance on a variety of tasks, but was overhyped in its approximation of reasoning.
Somebody being polite and friendly to you does not mean that the person is inferior to you and that you should therefore despise them.
Likewise somebody being rude and domineering to you does not mean that they are superior to you and should be obeyed and respected.
Politeness is a tool and a lubricant, and Finns probably loose out on a lot of international business and opportunities because of this mentality that you're demonstrating. Look at the Japanese for inspiration, who were an economic miracle, while sharing many positive values with the Finns.
We are also talking about a tool here. I don't want fluff from a tool, I want the thing I'm seeking from the tool, and in this case it's info. Adding fluff just annoys me because it takes more mental power to skip all the irrelevant parts.
And my first thought was... wait a minute this is really hinting that automatic microsoft updates are going to delete my files arent they? Sure enough, that happened soon after
You're absolutely right!