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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

Aren’t you already using English in the LLM convo? Telling the model to use French for research or to find resources in French seems like a reasonable step.

If you’re doing this on a daily basis, then you should have an AGENTS.md that accumulates directional instructions like this.

This is how you use the tool correctly.

There’s this weird pattern I’ve noticed where people expect LLMs to require zero effort or proficiency on their part, and when the LLM isn’t perfect without it, of course it wasn’t; LLMs suck.

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The issue is that French, Italian, African, Japanese people shouldn't have the inconvenience of instructing the LLM tool to get the basic facts about their own culture. They should use an LLM that has already been trained like that by default. Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American. If I go to Google for example I want to get facts about my own country in my own language.

>Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American

Very very emphatic agree from my end, thanks.

Wouldn't those people be asking the questions in their own language in the first place? The model will reply in the language you use. This thread is about people asking for information about a language that is not the one they are messaging the LLM in

Even if the model will reply in my language, I often notice it searching in english. Or thinking in english. There's always something lost in translation. Sometimes it's just minor nuances. Other times it mangles the legal facts with those of other countries.

This sounds like the problem of people calling "911" as the emergency number which they see in so much US-American media but which is not the emergency number in their own country.

I remember being bored as a teenager on a family holiday to New Zealand in the 1990s, so I went and dialled 911 from a payphone to see what would happen-I got a recorded message saying that in New Zealand, the emergency number isn’t 911, it is 111. Dialling 000 (the Australian emergency number) produced a similar recorded message.

In a lot of countries, they redirect the number or put a voice message to the correct emergency number

They always sound like an obnoxious American tourist talking through a translator, the chatbot training dataset is the same and foundation models are always built with >50% American English data for some reason.

> Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American.

Then add top-level instructions saying what country you're from, what country you live in now, and which language you speak. This isn't that hard.

None of that even addresses the problem described, because none of the languages you mentioned would be French in the described example.

> Aren’t you already using English in the LLM convo? Telling the model to use French for research or to find resources in French seems like a reasonable step.

Most ordinary people will just use their native language and they have no way of knowing that the model always reasons in English and therefore is strongly biased toward using English search terms. So they don't know they have to remind the model to search in their local language.

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