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Comment by x______________

3 months ago 

  >先天下之忧而忧

How is this an example of a prompt?

Google translated this to "Worry about the world first" while Bing says "Worry before the worries of the world."

Can anyone shed some light on this saying or why it's in the article?

15 comments

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raincole  3 months ago

It's a very famous (classical) Chinese phrase.

Both translations don't catch the meaning well though. It means: "worry before the rest of the world (notice that they have something to) worry." The next part is 後天下之樂而樂("be happy only after the rest of the world is happy.")

I don't know why it's a prompt example.

SequoiaHope  3 months ago

Ask a language model - ChatGPT says it’s a line from a famous poem “Memorial to Yueyang Tower” which expresses the Confucian ideal of selfless concern for people and society.

gudzpoz  3 months ago

This clause is usually used together with the next sentence in the original poem:

> 先天下之忧而忧，后天下之乐而乐

> (put the world's worries before yours, and put your happiness after the world's) > edit: this translation is wrong, and raincole has a definitely better translation

Since the model is a language model, they probably use this to demonstrate the model's language capabilities – the model should be able to complete the whole sentence pair. The paper also mentions this:

> To ensure the model’s language capabilities, we introduced 10% of in-house text-only pretrain data.

So I believe it is just a text-only demonstration.

  • jdthedisciple  3 months ago

    Sibling comment has the second part as

    後天下之樂而樂

    Which one is correct?

    • numpad0  3 months ago 

        a) 后天下之乐而乐
  b) 後天下之樂而樂
  c) 後天下之楽而楽

      a) is clearly Simplified Chinese from a sibling comment, b) is Traditional copied from your comment, and c) is as I just typed in my own language. Unicode Hanzi/Kanji are a mess and there are characters same or different, in appearance or in binary, depending on intended variants, languages, fonts, systems, keyboard, distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri, etc.

      4 replies →