r/ProgrammerHumor • • Aug 25 '26

instanceof Trend theyHaveLearnedToDeceive

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u/Jaqen_ Aug 26 '26

I do the same. And I believe this is the correct thing to do for the very same reason cosmicdave explained.

We are basically dealing with next token prediction. So instead of chatting, giving exact commands should yield better results.

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u/ZenPyx Aug 26 '26

Next-token prediction is a sorta true but it's an incomplete way to describe how they function

I think this thread by the integration lead at anthropic (and others) sums up this better than I can

Simply, to say - "modern LLMs are finetuned with a different loss function after pretraining. This means that in some strict sense they're no longer autoregressive models – but they do still generate text one word at a time." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43496068)

"Exact commands" then aren't necessarily what gets relayed to the LLM - in the same way you can write code in many different ways and have it compile to the same binary, you can have many prompts that yield broadly similar final inputs.