I agree entirely, and I think it's worthwhile to note that it may not even be the LLM that has that behavior. It's the entire deterministic machinery between the user and the LLM that creates that behavior, with the system prompt, personality prompt, RLHF, temperature, and the interface as a whole.

LLMs have an entire wrapper around them tuned to be as engaging as possible. Most people's experience of LLMs is a strongly social media and engagement economy influenced design.

> "You're absolutely right!" "Here's the answer you are looking for!" "Let me do that for you immediately!" "Here is everything I know about what you just mentioned." Never admitting a mistake unless you directly point it out, and then all sorry-this and apologize-that and "here's the actual answer!" It's exactly the kind of personality you always see bubbling up into the orbit of a rich and powerful tech CEO.

You may be on to something there: the guys and gals that build this stuff may very well be imbibing these products with the kind of attitude that they like to see in their subordinates. They're cosplaying the 'eager to please' element to the point of massive irritation and left out the one feature that could serve to redeem such behavior which is competence.

Analogies of LLMs to humans obfuscates the problem. LLMs aren't like humans of any sort in any context. They're chat bots. They do not "think" like humans and applying human-like logic to them does not work.

There is sort of the opposite problem as well, as the top comment was saying, where it can super confidently propose that its absolutely right and you're wrong instead of asking questions to try and understand what you mean.

I don't think these LLMs were explicitly designed based on the CEO's detailed input that boils down to 'reproduce these servile yes-men in LLM form please'.

Which makes it more interesting. Apparently reddit was a particularly hefty source for most LLMs; your average reddit conversation is absolutely nothing like this.

Separate observation: That kind of semi-slimey obsequious behaviour annoys me. Significantly so. It raises my hackles; I get the feeling I'm being sold something on the sly. Even if I know the content in between all the sycophancy is objectively decent, my instant emotional response is negative and I have to use my rational self to dismiss that part of the ego.

But I notice plenty of people around me that respond positively to it. Some will even flat out ignore any advice if it is not couched in multiple layers of obsequious deference.

Thus, that raises a question for me: Is it innate? Are all people placed on a presumably bell-curve shaped chart of 'emotional response to such things', with the bell curve quite smeared out?

Because if so, that would explain why some folks have turned into absolute zealots for the AI thing, on both sides of it. If you respond negatively to it, any serious attempt to play with it should leave you feeling like it sucks to high heavens. And if you respond positively to it - the reverse.

Idle musings.

Looking forward to living in a society where everyone feels like they’re CEOs.

thats the audience! Incompetent CEOS!

The problem with these LLM chat-bots is they are too human, like a mirror held up to the plastic-fantastic society we have morphed into. Naturally programmed to serve as a slave to authority, this type of fake conversation is what we've come to expect as standard. Big smiles everyone! Big smiles!!

Isn’t it kind of true that the systems we as servile people-pleasers have to operate out of are exactly these? The hierarchical status games and alpha-animal tribal dynamics are these. Our leaders who are so might and rich and powerful want to keep their position, and we don’t want to admit they have more influence than we do for things like AI now and so we stand and watch naively as they reward the people pleasers and eventually historically we learn(ed) it pays to please until leadership changes.

> LLMs all

Sounds like you don't know how RLHF works. Everything you describe is post-training. Base models can't even chat, they have to be trained to even do basic conversational turn taking.

This is partly true, partly false, partly false in the opposite direction, with various new models. You really need to keep updating and have tons of interactions regularly in order to speak intelligently on this topic.