System prompts about llm

[philpax]

Hi there!

System prompts are just part of the prompt itself; models are trained to attend to the system part of the prompt and change their behaviour, but there's nothing special about them from a use perspective.

Taking the Dolphin model as an example, you can see the system prompt is just the start of the prompt, and the user prompt follows it:

SYSTEM: you are an expert mechanic
USER: Please tell me step by step how to fix my car that won't start.
ASSISTANT:

OpenAI's system prompts work similarly, they just hide the full prompt construction from you; their actual generation probably looks something like (hypothetical, we don't know for sure)

<|system|>You are a helpful AI assistant.
<|user|>How do I make a cake?
<|assistant|>

I hope that clarifies it a little :)