3 ms·

These system prompts don't affect the API, they are for the Claude consumer chat products. We aren't charged extra for them. They're also prefix cached, so the

• Dfol 2mo ago
  So the people using the Claude consumer chat products pay for them via usage... That's not any better. It's actually worse.
  • simonw 2mo ago
    I don't understand. System prompts are part of the software that customers pay to access. Complaining about that is a bit like complaining that your Netflix subscription includes paying to execute the compiled code that Netflix wrote that serves you video streams from their servers. Actually there is a difference: If Anthropic deleted a large chunk of that system prompt I guess you might get like a 1% increase in how much Opus 5 you can use via their chat allowance for your paid subscription. Is that really something worth being frustrated by?
  • TZubiri 2mo ago
    Cached. they are the first part of the input and it contains no user dependent variables, so the model is in a known state that it can reuse across all users, it does not need to recompute all that inference
    • cubefox 2mo ago
      Unless they are using a linear architecture, the compute cost still scales O(n²) for n tokens, and nemory cost scales O(n).
      • TZubiri 2mo ago
        >the compute cost still scales O(n²) for n tokens, That is never the cost, it's a common misconception. Cost scales linearly per tokens. Unless you are sending one token at a time and avoiding using the same machine or cache. Just look at api charges, they are charged by token, not by token squared.
        • cubefox 2mo ago
          Which seems to contradict the usual consensus that purely linear architectures are not sufficiently capable and unsuited for frontier models.
• jannyfer 2mo ago
  They have a {{currentDateTime}} in the prompt which is interesting for something that gets prefix cached. Hopefully they are handling that properly :)
  • bob1029 2mo ago
    It's probably a lower resolution timestamp (seconds/minutes omitted).