Comment by lwarfield

10 hours ago

I've always wondered why the industry relies on the giant monolithic system prompt. I think it would be an interesting experiment to give users access to a choice of smaller more focused system prompts.

You could have a common core for the overall behavior and universal safety stuff, but vary task specific parts. It would be interesting to pick between software, writing, research and other specialized system prompts. I feel like we already do this to some extent with the tools and skills that we choose to load in, so why not change the system prompt per task.

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lwarfield

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bob1029  3 hours ago

The reason is because they need one product to cover 100% of their customer base. Combinatorics get nasty real fast at these scales.

singularity2001  7 hours ago

Also, why don't they bake in these limitations via reinforcement learning so they can keep the prompt context clear.

  • dragonwriter  3 hours ago

    Because it is cheaper to have different behavior for internal use, special (e.g., government) customers, etc. if they are differentiated by things like system prompts and external guardrails than if they are different model versions with their own final training regime, and also its faster and cheaper to respond to problems even with a single public version by updating a system prompt than rertraining.

  • pennomi  3 hours ago

    Presumably because these system prompt “limitations” are not given to government contracts, and training it into the model gets increasingly expensive the more versions you have to maintain.