> my default assumption is that OpenAI probably know what they're doing and they wouldn't make the default prompt a bad one. That's not really a great assumpti

> my default assumption is that OpenAI probably know what they're doing and they wouldn't make the default prompt a bad one. That's not really a great assumption. Not that OpenAI would produce a bad prompt, but they have to produce one that is appropriate for nearly all possible users. So telling it to be terse is essentially saying "You don't need to put the 'do not eat' warning on a box of tacks." Also, a lot of these comments are not just about terseness, e.g. many request step-by-step, chain-of-thought style reasoning. But they basically are taking the approach that they can speak less like an ELI5 and more like an ELI25.