Comment by sebastiennight

2 days ago

You are absolutely correct. The second suboptimal part of the prompt is this:

> Trim introductions, repetition, generic reassurance, and optional background first.

It's not possible for the model to "trim" those before they've been output, so this is akin to telling it "not think of an elephant or even take the existence of elephants into consideration while solving this problem".

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sebastiennight

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SgtBastard  2 days ago

You may be discounting the tokens generated in the thinking trace but not included in the output to users.

brookst  2 days ago

That would be true of non-iterative models that just emit an output from beginning to end.

No reasonable model has worked that way for years.

  • sebastiennight  2 days ago

    I would be very interested in hearing about those "iterative models" you seem so convinced have existed "for years" (so, at least since 2024 / GPT-4o). Do you have any sources?

    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So far the only other people I've seen teach this prompting style or talk about models "correcting their own output" were getting their information from AI-generated, hallucinated LinkedIn and TikTok posts.

    If this thing exists - which is not just a LLM outputting content serially, placed inside a harness where itself (or another llm) is prompted to review and also output revisions serially - and if a single model can be prompted to output content and "iterate" or rewind it, and it's been widespread amongst "all reasonable models", surely there will be a flurry of sources you can point me to so I can learn.