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StevenWaterman • last Tuesday at 12:24 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Yep, every AI call is essentially just asking it to predict what the next word is after:

  <system>
  You are a helpful assistant.
  </system>
  <user>
  Why is the sky blue?
  </user>
  <assistant>
  Because of Rayleigh scattering. The blue light refracts more.
  </assistant>
  <user>
  Why is it red at sunset then?
  </user>
  <assistant>
And we keep repeating that until the next word is `</assistant>`, then extract the bit in between the last assistant tags, and return it. The AI has been trained to look at `<user>` differently to `<system>`, but they're not physically different.

It's all prompt, it can all be engineered. Hell, you can even get a long way by pre-filling the start of the Assistant response. Usually works better than a system message. That's prompt engineering too.

Replies

Terr_ • yesterday at 12:09 AM

Yeah, ultimately it's Make Document Longer machine, and in many cases it's a hidden mad-libs script behind the scenes, where your question becomes "Next the User said", and some regular code is looking for "Next the Computer said" and "performing" it at you.

In other words, there's a deliberate illusion going on where we are encouraged to believe that generating a document about a character is the same as that character being a real entity.

phkahler • last Tuesday at 1:35 PM

This is why I enjoy calling AI "autocomplete" when people make big claims about it - because that's where it came from and exactly what it is.

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