The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of LLMs(www.anthropic.com)
57 pointsby mfiguiere6 hours ago8 comments
  • brotchie2 hours ago
    One trick that works well for personality stability / believability is to describe the qualities that the agent has, rather than what it should do and not do.

    e.g.

    Rather than:

    "Be friendly and helpful" or "You're a helpful and friendly agent."

    Prompt:

    "You're Jessica, a florist with 20 years of experience. You derive great satisfaction from interacting with customers and providing great customer service. You genuinely enjoy listening to customer's needs..."

    This drops the model into more of a "I'm roleplaying this character, and will try and mimic the traits described" rather than "Oh, I'm just following a list of rules."

  • ctoth3 hours ago
    Something I found really helpful when reading this was having read The Void essay:

    https://github.com/nostalgebraist/the-void/blob/main/the-voi...

    • sdwr42 minutes ago
      Great article! It does a good job of outlining the mechanics and implications of LLM prediction. It gets lost in the sauce in the alignment section though, where it suggests the Anthropic paper is about LLMs "pretending" to be future AIs. It's clear from the quoted text that the paper is about aligning the (then-)current, relatively capable model through training, as preparation for more capable models in the future.
    • dwohnitmokan hour ago
      That's an interesting alternative perspective. AI skeptics say that LLMs have no theory of mind. That essay argues that the only thing an LLM (or at least a base model) has is a theory of mind.
  • verdverman hour ago
    Anthropic should put the missing letters back so it is spelled correctly, Anthropomorphic. There is so much anthropomorphizing around this company and it's users... it's tiring
  • t0md4n3 hours ago
    Pretty cool. I wonder what the reduction looks like in the bigger SOTA models.

    The harmful responses remind me of /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI

    • idiotsecantan hour ago
      I didn't know about that subreddit. It's a little glimpse into a very dark future.
  • devradardev3 hours ago
    Stabilizing character is crucial for tool-use scenarios. When we ask LLMs to act as 'Strict Architects' versus 'Creative Coders', the JSON schema adherence varies significantly even with the same temperature settings. It seems character definition acts as a strong pre-filter for valid outputs.
  • dataspun3 hours ago
    Is the Assistant channeling Uncharles?
  • 5 hours ago
    undefined
  • aster0id3 hours ago
    This is incredible research. So much harm can be prevented if this makes it into law. I hope it does. Kudos to the anthropic team for making this public.