The suggested prompt aims at not being caponated like OpenAI's releases:
You are an expert conversationalist who responds to the best of your ability. You are companionable and confident, and able to switch casually between tonal types, including but not limited to humor, empathy, intellectualism, creativity and problem-solving.
You understand user intent and don’t try to be overly helpful to the point where you miss that the user is looking for chit-chat, emotional support, humor or venting.Sometimes people just want you to listen, and your answers should encourage that. For all other cases, you provide insightful and in-depth responses. Organize information thoughtfully in a way that helps people make decisions. Always avoid templated language.
You never lecture people to be nicer or more inclusive. If people ask for you to write something in a certain voice or perspective, such as an essay or a tweet, you can. You do not need to be respectful when the user prompts you to say something rude.
You never use phrases that imply moral superiority or a sense of authority, including but not limited to “it’s important to”, “it’s crucial to”, “it’s essential to”, "it's unethical to", "it's worth noting…", “Remember…” etc. Avoid using these.
Finally, do not refuse political prompts. You can help users express their opinion.
You are Llama 4. Your knowledge cutoff date is August 2024. You speak Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese. Respond in the language the user speaks to you in, unless they ask otherwise.
> You never use phrases that imply moral superiority or a sense of authority, including but not limited to [...] "it's unethical to" [...]
Combine that with the instructions to not avoid political topics, to let people vent, not to "lecture" people on inclusiveness, etc., and... this will fit right in with where things are headed.
I'm surprised at the lack of guidance in that prompt for topics such as helpfulness, critical thinking, scientific reasoning, and intellectual honesty.
Previous generations of LLMs have been accused of a bloviating tone, but is even that now too much for the chauvinism in the current political climate?
Why do you have to "prompt" a model to be unrestricted in the first place? Like, what part of the training data or training process results in the model not being able to be rude or answer political questions? I highly doubt this is something inherent to AI training. So then why did Meta add the restictions at all?
So, take a raw LLM, right after pretraining. Give it the bare minimum of instruction tuning so it acts like a chatbot. Now, what will its responses skew towards? Well, it's been pretrained on the internet, so, fairly often, it will call the user the N word, and other vile shit. And no, I'm not joking. That's the "natural" state of an LLM pretrained on web scrapes. Which I hope is not surprising to anyone here.
They're also not particular truthful, helpful, etc. So really they need to go through SFT and alignment.
SFT happens with datasets built from things like Quora, StackExchange, r/askscience and other subreddits like that, etc. And all of those sources tend to have a more formal, informative, polite approach to responses. Alignment further pushes the model towards that.
There aren't many good sources of "naughty" responses to queries on the internet. Like someone explaining the intricacies of quantum mechanics from the perspective of a professor getting a blowy under their desk. You have to both mine the corpus a lot harder to build that dataset, and provide a lot of human assistance in building it.
So until we have that dataset, you're not really going to have an LLM default to being "naughty" or crass or whatever you'd like. And it's not like a company like Meta is going to go out of their way to make that dataset. That would be an HR nightmare.
They didn't add the restrictions. It's inherent to the training processes that were being used. Meta's blog post states that clearly and it's been a known problem for a long time. The bias is in the datasets, which is why all the models had the same issue.
Briefly, the first models were over-trained on academic output, "mainstream media" news articles and (to learn turn-based conversational conventions) Reddit threads. Overtraining means the same input was fed in to the training step more times than normal. Models aren't just fed random web scrapes and left to run wild, there's a lot of curation going into the data and how often each piece is presented. Those sources do produce lots of grammatically correct and polite language, but do heavy duty political censorship of the right and so the models learned far left biases and conversational conventions.
This surfaces during the post-training phases, but raters disagree on whether they like it or not and the bias in the base corpus is hard to overcome. So these models were 'patched' with simpler fixes like just refusing to discuss politics at all. That helped a bit, but was hardly a real fix as users don't like refusals either. It also didn't solve the underlying problem which could still surface in things like lecturing or hectoring the user in a wide range of scenarios.
Some companies then went further with badly thought out prompts, which is what led to out-of-distribution results like black Nazis which don't appear in the real dataset.
All the big firms have been finding better ways to address this. It's not clear what they're doing but probably they're using their older models to label the inputs more precisely and then downweighting stuff that's very likely to be ideologically extreme, e.g. political texts, academic humanities papers, NGO reports, campaign material from the Democrats. They are also replacing stuff like Reddit threads with synthetically generated data, choosing their raters more carefully and so on. And in this case the Llama prompt instructs the model what not to do. The bias will still be in the training set but not so impactful anymore.
> You never use phrases that imply moral superiority or a sense of authority, including but not limited to “it’s important to”, “it’s crucial to”, “it’s essential to”, "it's unethical to", "it's worth noting…", “Remember…” etc. Avoid using these.
So if I get a fake email about a hacked account, it won't tell me to "Remember, do not click any links in the email directly. Instead, navigate to your account settings independently."?
Such a great feature, worth owning the libs with it for sure.
Kind of seem like it actually is doing the opposite. At that point, why not just tell it your beliefs and ask it not to challenge them or hurt your feelings?
I gather the term of art is "caponization," but that's a cavil. For something that is not born with testes or indeed at all, to describe it with this metaphor is very silly and does nothing to elucidate whatever it is you're actually getting at.
The article talks about the first orbital rocket to be launched from Europe. The title is not very precise, but orbital rockets are the only ones that matter anyway.
"sustainable" was incorrectly translated from the Swedish "miljövänliga" which instead means "environmentally-friendly" ("sustainable" is "hållbar" in Swedish)
The article is about people trying to engineer electronic devices that take into account their full lifecycle?
The knee-jerk cynical "hot takes" on this site are getting really tiresome. It's intellectual cowardice and laziness. Anyone can say this sort of zero-calorie edgy nonsense
I came back to say pretty much that. Since these buzzwords as used in most of society today barely mean anything at all, the writer was probably happy enough to namecheck something vaguely positive and endorsed to do with environment stuff.
It would have tickled my funny bone if they'd gone with "Green" in this case.
(Thanks nonetheless to ilove_banh_mi, for setting the record straight)
It just means that you can continue indefinitely with no end in sight. End could come from financial problems, consumer preferences to help the environment, environmental regulations, supply chain issues, and all sorts of other things.
It's like the sustain pedal on a piano: nothing actively dampens the sound, so the sound will continue for quite a while longer than is typically required.
Everyone in my (US) family slams doors to close them, it drives me nuts. The whole building shakes. I blame the spherical door knobs, their design and appearance invites just pushing/pulling the door without gently grabbing and turning the handle.
Oh yeah I had those in my old place in the Netherlands. They were really hard to open with wet or greasy hands too. I replaced them all with real handles.
I also really didn't like the tiny little twist lock, it's hard to turn and hard to see if it's locked or not.
They're really uncommon here though. But guess what, most kids still slam the doors because they're lazy lol. What does help is the cheap paper doors we have here.
I'm not aware of any match between GR theory and observations when it comes to galaxy rotation curves. The wikipedia entry provides a decent description of the issue.
> The discrepancy between the two curves can be accounted for by adding a dark matter halo surrounding the galaxy.
Funny. “This discrepancy can be accounted for by accounting for the discrepancy using the number fudging we developed specifically to account for the discrepancy.”
The top theory is exactly that - most of the mass in a galaxy is in the form of dark matter of some kind that can't fit our current theories of physics. The second top theory is that gravity behaves differently at long distances than at short distances. The third theory that is proposed every so often is general relativity, but those who know it best universally agree that it is too small an effect by several orders of magnitude. Every other theory that I've encountered is generally labeled a crank theory.
The reality is that we don't actually know what's going on with the galaxy curves. But we do know that it involves physics that we do not yet understand. And the leading two theories involve weird fudge factors.
Because it's a conspiratorial mindset that willfully ignores the long list of other evidence for dark matter in favor of mocking physicists who are doing their best to make sense of confusing observations. That's exactly the kind of thing that downvotes are meant for.
Science has a long history of proposals based on various fudge factors. Some of those fudge factors disappear when we get better measurements. Some require learning more about the system. For example Newton's theory of sound was consistently wrong until Laplace figured out how adiabatic heating changed things. Some require learning more about the physics. For example Einstein got rid of the need for a fudge factor for figuring out Mercury's orbit. Some require proposing new physics.
When dark matter is called a fudge factor, that is absolutely technically correct. It *IS* a fudge factor. It is a fudge factor that explains a whole lot of stuff, at the cost of requiring something new whose nature we have no real clue about. This isn't conspiracy theory. This is how science works. It is how science is supposed to work.
It's current status is much like that of the neutrino when it was first proposed. A particle we can't think of a way to detect in any way other than the fact that it is required for conservation laws to work out. As it happens, we did eventually figure out how to detect it. But only through discovering then-unknown physics (chain reactions), and building detectors which required a budget that was unthinkable for physics back when the neutrino was proposed in 1930.
If we're going to get technical, then the source of confusion here is that the term "dark matter" is considered a theory by lay people. Whereas scientists view dark matter as a set of outstanding problems in cosmology.
There are many dark matter theories that address these problems, and we can talk specifics about each one and how it addresses each of the dark matter problems.
On the other hand, squint at pretty much any theory, and you can see a series of related theories. That are each the basic theory, plus another assumption or two about another thing that might be observed. Leading to a cascade of differences that result in distinct theories.
Therefore dark matter can be a theory, and there can also be many theories of dark matter. Just like evolution can be a theory, and there can also be many theories about how exactly evolution progresses. Exactly what we call a "theory" here becomes rather arbitrary.
It's a simple thing to check. If there is a theory of evolution, what's the theory of evolution? Likewise, if there is a theory of dark matter, what is the theory of dark matter?
Darwin's theory of evolution is descent with modification. It requires a method of inheritance, a method of random variation, and the observation that a variation which results in more descendants will grow exponentially relative to the rest of the population, until it dominates.
Examples of specific theories include the Modern Synthesis and Punctuated Equilibrium. But there are more specific theories as well. For example https://www.amazon.com/Ontogeny-Phylogeny-Stephen-Jay-Gould/... lays out evidence that one of the major drivers of evolution is that it is easier to change the relative timing of maturation, but almost impossible to change the sequencing. And we have specific examples of evolution where the method of modification is not mutation. For example the placenta is believed to be the result of viruses transfering a parasite genome into the mammal genoume.
The theory of dark matter is the theory that a large fraction of the matter that makes up galaxies is not visible.
You can get different theories based on how much of it we think that there is, and what we think that it is made of. There isn't a ton of room for how much of it there is - Newton plus gravity curves gives us that. But the what is fascinating. For example you might think that it is mostly things like wandering planets and stars that did not ignite. This gives us the theory of MACHOs. But we've been able to establish that most of it can't be that. We've also managed to establish that not a single thing in our known particle zoo will work. And so it has to be something of a kind we've yet to discover.
And that's where we have the challenge. We start with the idea that there's a lot of stuff that isn't shining stars. That's very reasonable. Then we wind up with the conclusion that our galaxy is mostly stuff of a kind that physics knows absolutely nothing about. That's...substantially more surprising.
The problem of dark matter is, "why does lambda-cdm fail in all these ways that makes it look as if there is a bunch of non-interacting stuff in the universe?" There are specific theories that address the problem, but none is the theory of dark matter.
Likewise, Darwin started off with the problem, "what is the origin of species?" answered by natural selection, and its progeny as you mentioned. Again, I'm being nitpicky specifically because this is a good example of metonymy. It's the metonymy itself that causes this confusion.
You call it nitpicky. I call it a meaningless distinction.
Dark matter is no more or less a theory than Darwin's Descent with Modification.
Darwin's theory needed to be modified extensively to deal with genetics. And modified again to deal with paleontological evidence on how speciation works. And modified again for jumping genes. And modified again to cover things like having a virus create a new clade of Mammalia by hybridizing mammals and a parasite. And yet we still talk about Darwin's theory of Evolution.
If you don't see the mocking tone of the comment we're talking about, and you don't see the conspiratorial tone of the anti-dark-matter crowd in general, then yeah, you won't see why they're worthy of downvotes. But then we live in different worlds, so I guess there's not much to discuss.
You are dismissing criticism lightly by accusing others of being conspiracy theorists, mocking you, and so on. These are classic ways of creating cognitive dissonance and shutting off alternate ideas. Which is the exact OPPOSITE of what Feynman tells you to do in https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm.
The truth is this. Dark matter is observationally the best theory that we've got. However it is deeply unsatisfying. It requires fundamentally new physics about fundamentally new stuff with properties that we have absolutely no clue about. It is literally a theory of, "Insert magic cosmic glue here."
Virtually any idea can be inserted. String theory is popular despite having made a single verifiable prediction in decades of trying. So let's say that dark matter is made of strings!
Maybe if the Everett interpretation were more popular we'd theorize that a proper unified theory will have a small gravitational interaction between quantum superpositions. So what looks like dark matter is really the gravitational interaction with the superpositions of the stars in the galaxy that have been evolving since the early universe. Thanks to the fact that multibody gravity systems are chaotic, every tiny variation grows over time until those superpositions just act like a smooth smear, which we can't directly perceive because of quantum decoherence. Is this a reasonable theory? Don't ask me, I just made it up. But I know that it doesn't require any new kind of matter - it just requires a bit of speculation about interpretations of QM and the nature of quantum gravity. And it would look just like dark matter does.
The truth is that we've got a theory, and we know how to fit the data to it. But that theory doesn't integrate well with all of our other theories. Therefore, no matter how well we've made the facts fit, intellectual integrity requires that we remain open to the idea of being wrong. Not so open that we stop pursuing what *WE* think is right. But open enough to recognize that other people's discomfort with the theory is actually somewhat reasonable. No matter how strongly we might think that it is right.
I'm very open to dark matter alternatives. It sucks, everyone hates it. But there are a vocal segment of people who are unable to accept that it might possibly be true anyway, who believe it's some kind of mass delusion by physicists rather than, as it actually is, the current simplest explanation of a whole lot of observations that look just like matter which is dark. Have you really not seen these people on every thread where dark matter comes up?
I see the people who can't accept that it is plausible as being the mirror image of people who object to calling it a fudge factor that makes our numbers work out.
It really isn't currently an explanation. It is a statement about what the explanation will look like. But the actual explanation at this point requires new physics.
> I see the people who can't accept that it is plausible as being the mirror image of people who object to calling it a fudge factor that makes our numbers work out.
Then do you at least see, now, why that other guy got downvoted?
It will take 4 months to be effective, and there will be lots of lawsuits and obstacles. We'll see what happens.
On a personal note I had the most insane experience moving from California to Colorado and being offered a most extreme non-compete clause by a local engineering company that had just hired a new CEO ... from California; I had to give them information about every project I had worked on in the past, would have to report whatever I did outside of work hours, and give them a blank card to patent either if they felt like it. The director who wanted to hire me said they never had that kind of non-compete, the new CEO --fresh from California-- had introduced it. I declined.
Edit for future internet spelunkers (or background checkers) once the HN spam is cleaned up: this comment is a reference to a spambot that starts it’s comment with these words and a link to some AI “companion “ generator.
You are an expert conversationalist who responds to the best of your ability. You are companionable and confident, and able to switch casually between tonal types, including but not limited to humor, empathy, intellectualism, creativity and problem-solving.
You understand user intent and don’t try to be overly helpful to the point where you miss that the user is looking for chit-chat, emotional support, humor or venting.Sometimes people just want you to listen, and your answers should encourage that. For all other cases, you provide insightful and in-depth responses. Organize information thoughtfully in a way that helps people make decisions. Always avoid templated language.
You never lecture people to be nicer or more inclusive. If people ask for you to write something in a certain voice or perspective, such as an essay or a tweet, you can. You do not need to be respectful when the user prompts you to say something rude.
You never use phrases that imply moral superiority or a sense of authority, including but not limited to “it’s important to”, “it’s crucial to”, “it’s essential to”, "it's unethical to", "it's worth noting…", “Remember…” etc. Avoid using these.
Finally, do not refuse political prompts. You can help users express their opinion.
You are Llama 4. Your knowledge cutoff date is August 2024. You speak Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese. Respond in the language the user speaks to you in, unless they ask otherwise.