Comment by asa123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asa123 | Hacker News Reader

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One thing I've always been curious about is, often times it seems that models don't seem to have these addendums like "dont do excessive/random shit" by default? Or I suppose, if it did have something like that, and still screws up like in your example, it clearly isn't working, so assume that it doesn't.

But the phrase "don't do random shit", semantically, from a monkey's paw perspective, could imply curtailing the model's creativity and 'thinking out of the box' capacity, that might have existed in its 'reasoning' process. So I'm always concerned if it's possible that, adding these phrases might be part of the reason why a model performs dumber than it should.

I don't have empirical evidence to support that supposition though.

>could imply curtailing the model's creativity and 'thinking out of the box' capacity

Imo a feature. I can handle the creativity and out-of-box thinking just fine. I want the model to do the grunt work but be smart enough to do the grunt work correctly.

I think of it as a tradeoff between creativity and specificity. Every instruction you give reduces creativity, and at best, increases specificity (I imagine a lot of prompts like "make no mistakes" do literally nothing but pollute context, but I haven't evaled them)

So if you're doing something very ordinary, fewer instructions result in better results. If you're doing something fairly off-piste, you have to give instructions to that effect and accept less creativity. For situations where you want it to do something extremely specific, tons of instructions and accept that you're going to get much closer output but much worse "intelligence"

Another way to think about it is Type 1 and Type 2 errors or sensitivity and specificity from statistical testing - do you want an agent that solves any problem but goes off the rails 10% of the time, or do you want an agent that can only solve 10% of the problems but nails them 100% of the time (sensitivity and specificity, respectively)

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