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These system prompts are interesting but it's surprising that they are not using a configuration format to specify API signatures for browsers and other tools.
by haltist 3y ago
These system prompts are interesting but it's surprising that they are not using a configuration format to specify API signatures for browsers and other tools. The specification would be much better expressed with some kind of logical syntax instead of prose.
- ShamelessC 3y agoThe LLM has been trained specifically (sorta) to be good at prose. There’s no parsing or lexical analysis done by the model. It can’t be coded so directly yet in a deterministic and reliable way. It will however likely understand common configuration formats, there’s just not necessarily a reason to do that over plain English.
- haltist 3y agoSyntax with formal semantics makes a lot more sense than ambiguous English prose, especially for something like function signatures. Moreover, logical syntax would allow expressing constraints that are very hard to do with informal prose because logical syntax is much more compact than prose and a lot less ambiguous. Something basic like simply typed predicate logic should be doable for the folks at OpenAI. Basically, whatever is possible to express with English prose for a computer to execute is always better expressed with formal syntax like lambda calculus. It can still include regular prose but the formal syntax makes it much more clear what is actually intended by the user.
- ShamelessC 3y agoI agree with you. I'm not talking about how it should be, I'm talking about current limitations which are themselves fuzzy and ill-defined. It's reasonable that if they're using plain english instead of a formally defined syntax, it's simply because that works better for now.