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Comment by squigz

11 days ago

I'd be unsatisfied with both of those answers. 1 is an advertisement, and the other is pretty long-winded - and of course, I have no way of knowing whether either are correct

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squigz

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dhx  11 days ago

Try a subjective prompt such as "which country has the most advanced car manufacturing industry" and you'll get responses with common subjective biases such as:

- Reliability: Japan

- Luxury: Germany

- Cost, EV batteries, manufacturing scale: China

- Software: USA

(similar output for both deepseek-r1-0528 and gemini-2.5-pro tested)

These LLM biases are worth something to the countries (and companies within) that are part of the automotive industry. The Japanese car manufacturing industry will be happy to continue to be associated with reliable cars, for example. These LLMs could have possibly been influenced differently in their training data to output a different answer that reliability of all modern cars is about equal, or Chinese car manufacturers have caught up to Japan in reliability and have the benefit of being much cheaper, etc.

  • glenstein  11 days ago

    Those companies can want that all they want, meanwhile the developers of LLMs themselves can choose or not choose to reflect that in their training or to monetize their training.

    You're absolutely right that there's an interest in affecting the output, but my hope is the design of models is not influenced by this, or that we can know enough about how models are designed to prefer ones that are not nudged in this way.

gpm  11 days ago

The person you replied to is about the third parties companies goal though, not the users.

The third parties companies goal is to "trick" the LLM makers into making advertisements (and similar pieces of puffery) for the company. The LLM makers goal is to... make money somehow... maybe by satisfying the users desire. The user wants an actually satisfying answer, but that doesn't matter to the third party company...