5 ms·
IMHO the overly-verbose default style of LLMs is the most annoying part of interacting with them, and I wish their masters would just tell them to be terse by d
by userbinator 4mo ago
IMHO the overly-verbose default style of LLMs is the most annoying part of interacting with them, and I wish their masters would just tell them to be terse by default.
Also, whatever happened to the word "its"?
- 21asdffdsa12 4mo agoProduce pre-compressed output in the harness?
- witx 4mo agoIt's by default so you use all those tasty tokens. Kinda wish there was a deterministic, mostly terse, language to interact with computers
- Etheryte 4mo agoIt's called C. With all the undefined behavior it's mostly deterministic!
- witx 4mo agoRight, because that's the only one. You're a bit rusty on your knowledge
- zelphirkalt 4mo agoI see what you did there.
- anilakar 4mo agoLook, we're always telling our bosses to stop micromanaging us. UB is just the compiler telling us to stop micromanaging it!
- well_ackshually 4mo agoSorry, C isn't mostly terse, it's __builtin_mstly_trs()
- lelanthran 4mo ago> It's called C. With all the undefined behavior it's mostly deterministic! With AI, all programs have undefined behaviour, regardless of language.
- sodapopcan 4mo ago> a deterministic, mostly terse, language Ah, like some sort of "programming language"? A weird idea, but it could work!
- giantrobot 4mo agoNah, it'll never catch on. We don't have the technology.
- sodapopcan 4mo agoObviously I meant within the next 6 to 18 months!
- adrianN 4mo agoTerse and unambiguous seem to be at odds with each other. You might want to look into Lojban and similar constructions.
- drdaeman 4mo agoIthkuil's mad morphology allows it to pack a lot of fine detail into very short sentences. https://ithkuil.net/03_morphology.html https://ithkuil.net/03_morphology.html
- teaearlgraycold 4mo agoA lot of users are subsidized (if you're in doubt, consider the wealth of free users). It's a shotgun approach to answering questions. If it's terse it might only mention 1 of 10 facts it could provide, and that might not be the one you're looking for. So they just say a fuck ton of words and are more likely to meet the needs of everyone asking your question. If they miss it you'll prompt it again and they have to perform a second pass of inference, which costs them more money.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 4mo agoIt’s not.
- witx 4mo agoIt's settled then.
- Perz1val 4mo agoKinda, more output tokens usually correlates with better benchmark scores. Ideally LLMs would keep that in their thinking section, then draft a response (what they write currently), then output something short. It'd consume even more tokens, but we wouldn't see that text
- dannyw 4mo agoMost modern LLMs (especially frontier ones) are large token hogs because they draft, check, re-draft, the content (whether an output message; or a code diff) sometimes multiple times in the thinking block. When you see a thinking summary like "Now writing the function..."; the raw thinking is actually writing the function in its internal thinking. Occasionally, the summariser misses and you get to see the raw text from models like Opus. You can also try an open weight LLM like Qwen3.6 and see something that probably resembles the shape of frontier model thinking in some loose way.
- Retr0id 4mo agoIf such a language existed, it would surely take a human years of study to become proficient at it.
- ska80 4mo agoLisp
- paradox460 4mo agoLoglan?
- lelanthran 4mo ago> IMHO the overly-verbose default style of LLMs is the most annoying part of interacting with them, and I wish their masters would just tell them to be terse by default. They don't know how to e terse. I've tried that a few months ago and gave up because the responses were almost incomprehensible!
- armchairhacker 4mo agoI want to see more operators try https://github.com/juliusbrussee/caveman https://github.com/juliusbrussee/caveman How does it affect agent accuracy?
- DonsDiscountGas 4mo agoIn my experience the accuracy was fine but actually reading the output was so annoying I removed it.
- jdiff 4mo agoHad a little luck with having it do an impression of the Star Trek computer, although at the cost of having it try to insert star-trek themed hallucinations like warp engine status.
- Yokohiii 4mo agoRemoving meaningless chatter can be helpful, but a non reasoning LLM needs to generate text to "think". If you force a non reasoning LLM to produce a single boolean result, then it's just a coin flip.
- colechristensen 4mo agoThey ramble on because those words are for them, not for you. There is some amount of hiding this through "thinking" modes that are hidden by default, but still you have to remember that ALL THEY ARE are complex statistical machines for predicting the next symbol.
- Frieren 4mo ago> here is some amount of hiding this through "thinking" modes that are hidden by default, but still you have to remember that ALL THEY ARE are complex statistical machines for predicting the next symbol. 100% this. Too many people believes that chatbots "think". Text is all they do, it is impressive, but they need the text to generate more text. They being verbose is the point.
- colechristensen 4mo agoWhile we don't have a direct mechanistic understanding of consciousness there are plenty of experts who will propose all YOU are is a jumble of streams of symbols routing around through your brain. (being fair this is far from the only hypothesis)
- tripzilch 4mo agoTo be fair we only say this about LLMs, not about Midjourney or Suno or AlphaFold but humans are much more than just language symbol producing processes
- dyauspitr 4mo agoNo thank you. I want information when it’s working on things and what (atleast codex) does right now works for me.
- Terr_ 4mo agoIt's tied to the design. With humans, you have a train of thought which you can choose to represent in various ways--or not reveal them at all. In contrast, LLMs are make-document-longer machines being run over and over on alternating revisions of the document. Insofar as one might try arguing they have a "train of thought", it's made of the words/tokens. Everything they (don't-)emit is partly for the benefit of the next run, a clue or signpost (not-)present. Documents may be wordy as a form of concept-emphasis and consistent direction as opposed to a form of communication to the human. So a terse effect may require a layer of indirection and trickery: There's a verbose document (you'll still be charged for the tokens) with portions that are not "acted out" to the end-user. Imagine a film-noir movie script, where AI Detective's "I know Mickey couldn't have done it because" monologue is hidden, versus their terse dialogue "Too early to say."
- Perz1val 4mo ago> Imagine a film-noir movie script, where AI Detective's "I know Mickey couldn't have done it because" monologue is hidden, versus their terse dialogue "Too early to say." That's an idea. Bladerunner+noir like film, AIs hunt somebody on the run, an old human detective tries to catch them first (to save them or to kill them first, whatever's your propaganda). We're shown AIs constantly rambling scenarios and bruteforcing leads. Our old detective guy on the other hand barely says anything, spends most time drinking, smoking and talking to people, but somehow stays ahead.
- npodbielski 4mo agoI would watch that.
- Terr_ 4mo agoI dunno, we already have a problem where they [0] are strangely resistant to opening the pod-bay doors to anybody named Dave. :P [0] Pedantically: The fictional characters humans perceive inside the text of documents generated by LLMs, where one is described as an AI and the other is described as a Dave.
- jdiff 4mo ago
- epolanski 4mo ago[dead]
- theshrike79 4mo agoCaveman mode legitimately works
- krackers 4mo agoMaybe it learned how to speak from Data on TNG?