Multiple people have asked me whether I could post this LW in some form, hence this linkpost.
~17,000 words. Originally written on June 7, 2025.
(Note: although I expect this post will be interesting to people on LW, keep in mind that it was written with a broader audience in mind than my posts and comments here. This had various implications about my choices of presentation and tone, about which things I explained from scratch rather than assuming as background, my level of comfort casually reciting factual details from memory rather than explicitly checking them against the original source, etc.
Although, come of think of it, this was also true of most of my early posts on LW [which were crossposts from my blog], so maybe it's not a big deal...)
Minor note: the 2021 Anthropic paper may have been the first published proposal of an AI assistant character, but the idea was being actively explored several years before that. Specifically, AI Dungeon allowed you to create custom scenarios for use with their GPT-2 integration, and among the most popular was a system prompt along the lines of "The following is a conversation between a human and an advanced AI who is friendly and very helpful." I first made one myself in summer 2020, and the capability was originally offered by the devs in December 2019.
Wild to think how this kludgy "talk to an AI" workaround basically laid the foundation for ChatGPT, "prompt engineering", and the whole AI chatbot phenomenon.
A long essay about LLMs, the nature and history of the the HHH assistant persona, and the implications for alignment.
Multiple people have asked me whether I could post this LW in some form, hence this linkpost.
~17,000 words. Originally written on June 7, 2025.
(Note: although I expect this post will be interesting to people on LW, keep in mind that it was written with a broader audience in mind than my posts and comments here. This had various implications about my choices of presentation and tone, about which things I explained from scratch rather than assuming as background, my level of comfort casually reciting factual details from memory rather than explicitly checking them against the original source, etc.
Although, come of think of it, this was also true of most of my early posts on LW [which were crossposts from my blog], so maybe it's not a big deal...)