Comment by flir
1 day ago
I've been starting with "write three paragraphs about X" when I want to talk about X, as a form of "priming the pump" - getting closer to the useful point in the phase space. After all, it doesn't matter who in the conversation generates the magic words, as long as they're present. I think your approach might be better. It's certainly enlightening. Thanks.
You, sir, are doing exactly the right thing and it works for the exact same reason that my prompt works. Whether my method is ‘better’ or not is probably a chocolate vs caramel debate.
What you might not have fully realized is that it’s exactly what enabling “thinking” does as well. That’s why that exists and it literally does what you’re doing as well: it primes the system. You say “light sensor and amplifier” and at some point it outputs “photodiode and transimpedance amplifier” - now you’re off into advanced responses. The thing is, if you knew it you could have just used those words in your question and received much the same response. “Thinking” exists to turn “So, I was wondering..” into academic prose that raises the probability of academic tokens in the response.
You can kind of cheat the system by doing the same thing for a fraction of the token cost by using something like Haiku to provide a comma separated list of advanced topics and jargon associated with {Your question}, then tack that onto your prompt to Opus with thinking disabled. Obviously easier if you’re using the API, but I’ve run hundreds of millions of tokens though that process and it’s consistently and measurably better than their default thinking. I believe that’s because Anthropic and OpenAI drank their own kool-aid and are treating it like a sentient being that needs to add “hmm…good question” so it feels more thinky about things ‘cause that’s how we do it. The fact that it isn’t, and doesn’t, is why I developed the example prompt I showed earlier; it’s an extreme play on the offloaded “thinking” I also use.