"You are a helpful AI assistant" : r/LocalLLaMA

[irthomasthomas]

• "You are a helpful AI assistant" : r/LocalLLaMA

"You are a helpful AI assistant"

Discussion
I've been stumbling around this sub for awhile, testing all the small models and preaching the good word of the omnipotent OpenHermes. Here's some system prompt tips I've picked up:

Don't say "don't": this confuses them, which makes sense when you understand how they "think". They do their best to string concepts together, but they simply generate the next word in the sequence from the context available. Saying "don't" will put everything following that word into the equation for the following words. This can cause it to use the words and concepts you're telling it not to.
Alternative: try to use "Only" statements. Instead of "Don't talk about any other baseball team besides the New York Yankees" say "Only talk about the New York Yankees".
CAPITALIZING INSTRUCTIONS: For some reason, this works when used sparingly, it even makes some models pay attention to "don't". Surprisingly, this seems to work with even ChatGPT. It can quickly devolve your system prompt into confused yelling if you don't limit it, and can even cause your model to match the format and respond with confused yelling, so really only once or twice on important concepts.
\n: A well formated system prompt goes a long way. Splitting up different sections with a line break makes a noticeable improvement in comprehension of the system prompt by the model. For example, here is my format for LMStudio:
" Here is some information about the user: (My bio)

(system prompts)

Here is some context for the conversation: (Paste in relevant info such as web pages, documentation, etc, as well as bits of the convo you want to keep in context. When you hit the context limit, you can restart the chat and continue with the same context).

"You are a helpful AI assistant" : this is the demo system prompt to just get agreeable answers from any model. The issue with this is, once again, how they "think". The models can't conceptualize what is helpful beyond agreeing with and encouraging you. This kind of statement can lead to them making up data and concepts in order to agree with you. This is extra fun because you may not realize the problem until you discover for yourself the falacy of your own logic.
Think it through/Go over your work: This works, but I think it works because it directs attention to the prompt and response. Personally, I think there's better ways to do this.
Role assignment: telling it to act as this character or in that role is obviously necessary in some or even most instances, but this can also be limiting. It will act as that character, with all the limits and falacies of that character. If your waifu can't code, neither will your AI.
Telling it to be confident: This is a great way to circumvent the above problem, but also runs the risk of confident hallucinations. Here's a 2 prompt trick I use:
Tell one assistant to not answer the user prompt, but to simply generate a list of facts, libraries, or research points from its own data that can be helpful to answering the prompt. The prompt will be answered by the same model LLM, so write the list with the same model LLM as the future intended audience instead of a human.

Then pass the list to your assistant you intend to chat with with something like "you can confidently answer in these subjects that you are an expert in: (the list).

The point of this ^ is to limit its responses to what it actually knows, but make it confidentially answer with the information it's sure about. This has been incredibly useful in my cases, but absolutely check their work.

Suggested labels

{ "key": "sparse-computation", "value": "Optimizing large language models using sparse computation techniques" }