Comment by Macuyiko
16 hours ago
Weirdly it has gotten so far that I have embedded this into my workflow and will often prompt:
> "Good work so far, now I want to take it to another step (somewhat related but feeling it too hard): <short description>. Do you think we can do it in this conversation or is it better to start fresh? If so, prepare an initial prompt for your next fresh instantiation."
Sometimes the model says that it might be better to start fresh, and prepares a good summary prompt (including a final 'see you later'), whereas in other cases it assures me it can continue.
I have a lot of notebooks with "initial prompts to explore forward". But given the sycophancy going on as well as one-step RL (sigh) post-training [1], it indeed seems AI platforms would like to keep the conversation going.
[1] RL in post-training has little to do with real RL and just uses one shot preference mechanisms with an RL inspired training loop. There is very little work in terms of long-term preferences slash conversations, as that would increase requirements exponentially.
Is there any reason to think that LLMs have the introspection ability to be able to answer your question effectively? I just default to having them provide a summary that I can use to start the next conversation, because I’m unclear on how an LLM would know it’s losing the plot due to long context window.