this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Some AI models get more accurate at maths if you ask them to respond as if they are a Star Trek character, ML engineers say::Researchers asking a chatbot to optimize its own prompts found it was best at solving grade-school math when acting like it was on Star Trek.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 year ago (4 children)

*Picks up wireless mouse* Hello, computer.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

is this ... transparent Aluminium?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They did it. The crazy son's of bitches did it! Quite awhile ago, it's commercially available.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

There is also This transparent aluminum (linked in that same article) and it's been used in phone/watch screens also.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Ah yes. Star Trek: The One With The Whales.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago
[–] vvv 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Are you sure?!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

LOL I had completely forgotten about this bit!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

If you ask them to respond like a politician they answer all your questions with something completely different.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did they try to ask the models to act as Euler, Gauss or Tao?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Tao said he would ask the AI model to pretend to be a colleague before asking it anything. So your suggestion works!

After a long dig: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/110601051375142142

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

“Answer as if you’re a tribble.“

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But then all it can do is multiply.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

That’s troubling.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Reverse the polarity!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It is only logical that an algorithm trained on the ways of a Vulcan, is precise and accurate in it operation and communication. Vastly more fascinating are the result when you ask it to behave like a human.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Its because it dosent try to answer right, but more what it thinks toy want to see/read 🤷

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Doh. This says to have the AI write the prompt for you, but it doesn't give any examples of doing that.

I don't want to get into a rabbit hole looking up examples from the wide internet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


A study attempting to fine-tune prompts fed into a chatbot model found that, in one instance, asking it to speak as if it were on Star Trek dramatically improved its ability to solve grade-school-level math problems.

"It's both surprising and irritating that trivial modifications to the prompt can exhibit such dramatic swings in performance," the study authors Rick Battle and Teja Gollapudi at software firm VMware in California said in their paper.

"Among the myriad factors influencing the performance of language models, the concept of 'positive thinking' has emerged as a fascinating and surprisingly influential dimension," Battle and Gollapudi said in their paper.

Their study found that in almost every instance, automatic optimization always surpassed hand-written attempts to nudge the AI with positive thinking, suggesting machine learning models are still better at writing prompts for themselves than humans are.

The prompt then asked the AI to include these words in its answer: "Captain's Log, Stardate [insert date here]: We have successfully plotted a course through the turbulence and are now approaching the source of the anomaly."

Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, has a global deal to allow OpenAI to train its models on its media brands' reporting.


The original article contains 820 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

LLM detractors hate this one weird trick

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

We've finally figured out how to trick the computer that's bad at math into being less bad at math.