Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>Your mental model of what Claude is and does is the problem here. Short of a revolutionary breakthrough in AI techniques, the LLMs will continue to do matrix math across a huge bunch of weights that cannot change based on anything you say.

Sorry, but your mental model is wrong.

LLMs do matrix math across "a huge bunch of weights that cannot change based on anything you say", but the matrix math and results are informed (key concept here) by what you said, including the memory of what you said earlier in the discussion (and in some setups, even across discussions).

That's what a bloody prompt does.

It's entirely logic for the parent to want the LLM's matrix math + model + internal prompt, to accepts its prompt about LegalEagle and work with that, instead of arguing and giving him shit about it.

Especially since the earlier version of the model consistently worked like he wanted, and the new one consistently doesn't. He's not asking for some new unforeseen capability unknown to LLMs.

Exactly that.

I provided a question, and when given an incomplete answer, I provided with more info.

It refused to accept the additional info due to limited access to Youtube.

There was nothing more than that. There were no expectations.

The hostility and the amount of assumptions here are very strange.

...almost as strange as having a website accuse me of hallucinating a video and trying to gaslight it :D

You need to think this thought through all the way to the end. What it has said also influences what it will say. If it has consistently made combative responses, then the most likely thing to do is to continue to be combative.

I don't think there is any way back after the conversation takes a turn like that so there is no point in arguing with it. The only thing you can do is to fork the conversation before it made the first mistake and give it more context or tell it to look things up.

I wasn't arguing with it.

> "The only thing you can do is to fork the conversation before it made the first mistake and give it more context or tell it to look things up."

This is a key detail that many folks don't seem to understand about LLMs in general. The generation of a response happens based on the model weights and the context window (the system prompt + everything it's fed about the conversation thus far + any additional data included as part of the overall prompt). Each response technically stands alone and is generated entirely from only that context given to it and the model's existing "token space" weights. The illusion of an ongoing conversation is maintained "behind the scenes" by keeping that "context window" updated with the current state of the conversation as context for the next prompt, but the next response is technically an entirely new generation of text.

What it all means in a TL;DR sense is that the fix for a refusal is not to continue the "argument", but simply to remove that entire interaction from the conversation entirely as if it never happened and try a different tack with new / updated / more complete context to get the response you're expecting / seeking.

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