Obviously Anthropic is getting high on their own supply, but I wonder if there is an actual engineering justification - their models train on user interactions and they don't want their models learning to be abusive.
I don't think there's anything going on inside other than predictions. That being said, being nice never hurts.
If I'm mean to some people and nice to others, that just means I'm an a-hole. I don't wanna be that. Being kind all around helps me be a better person in the world. And in some cases with the robots, it helps as well.
Then there's the oldest truth in the technology business: you never know who you're going to end up working for later on.
Being polite to a model isn't like saying please and thank you to my dog when he does his business, it's like saying please and thank you to my furnace when it turns on and off.
True, but if saying “please” has a measurable functional effect then this is an important characteristic of the system. I also observed that saying please and thank you produced notably different responses. For me, there’s no real danger of anthropomorphism—I recognize that it’s a machine. But I also want it to do what I ask, so in my mind it’s really no different than having to use semicolons in Java but not in Python.
> it’s really no different than having to use semicolons in Java but not in Python.
At the same time there might be knock on effects of functionslising politeness when we talk to other people.
So saying please and thanks isn't anthropomorphizing the models, it's more simply using input patterns that get better outputs more aligned to the desired result.
It also has the benefit of reinforcing polite behavior among us, the humans. Side benefit, but it is a thing to consider.
Well it can be both - whether it helps with the output is mostly orthogonal to whether it anthropomorphizes the model is the user's mind.
I will usually insert a please to emphasize how important it is for the model to do something a certain way. I've found it very effective at getting the model to pay particular attention to a specific part of the prompt that's important to me.
Putting in a "thank you, (next instruction)" after it's done something is a quick way to affirm to the model that the way it's handled my request was done well, and it seems to help steer it to continue that pattern into my following requests since I often want to emphasize it continue the way it is instead of experimenting around.
Siri, text my dad … send it. Thank you.
And then it could stop trying to listen. It sounds like you’re being polite, but it would have a secondary meaning too. Kind of like using the stop word to end an LLM’s output token list.