Comment by sgbeal
6 hours ago
> There is actual research suggesting concise prompting can reduce response length substantially without always wrecking quality,
Anecdote: i discussed that with an LLM once and it explained to me that LLMs tend to respond to terse questions with terse answers because that's what humans (i.e. their training data) tend to do. Similarly, it explained to me that polite requests tend to lead to LLM responses with _more_ information than a response strictly requires because (again) that's what their training data suggests is correct (i.e. because that's how humans tend to respond).
TL;DR: how they are asked questions influences how they respond, even if the facts of the differing responses don't materially differ.
(Edit: Seriously, i do not understand the continued down-voting of completely topical responses. It's gotten so bad i have little choice but to assume it's a personal vendetta.)
LLMs don't understand what they are doing, they can't explain it to you, it's just creating a reasonable sounding response
But that response is grounded in the training data they've seen, so it's not entirely unreasonable to think their answer might provide actual insights, not just statistical parroting.
What do you mean? It is grounded on the text it is fed, the reason it said that was that humans have said that or something similar to it, not because it analyzed a lot of LLM information and thought up that answer itself.
LLM can "think" but that requires a lot of tokens to do, all quick answers are just human answers or answers it was fed with some basic pattern matching / interpolation.
this continual down-voting is not a personal thing for sure. perhaps there are crawlers that pretend to be more humane, or fully automated llm commenters which also randomly downvote.