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The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of LLMs

127 points by mfiguiere

by brotchie

2 subcomments

by ctoth

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Something I found really helpful when reading this was having read The Void essay:
https://github.com/nostalgebraist/the-void/blob/main/the-voi...

by t0md4n

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Pretty cool. I wonder what the reduction looks like in the bigger SOTA models.
The harmful responses remind me of /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI

by zmj

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I wrote something fiction-ish about this dynamic last year: https://zmj.dev/author_assistant.html

by PunchyHamster

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Putting effort into preventing jailbreaks seems like a waste, it's clearly what people want to use your product for, why annoy customers instead of providing the option in the first place ?
Also I'm curious what's the "demon" data point with a bunch of ones that have positive connotation

by devradardev

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Stabilizing character is crucial for tool-use scenarios. When we ask LLMs to act as 'Strict Architects' versus 'Creative Coders', the JSON schema adherence varies significantly even with the same temperature settings. It seems character definition acts as a strong pre-filter for valid outputs.

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by hatmanstack

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Does anybody have a better understanding of activation capping? Simple cosine similarity?

by ranyume

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It's still not clear if the Assistant character is the best at completing tasks.

by Bolwin

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My God those stabilized responses are sickening. If anthropic implements this, they'll kill their models' dominance in writing and roleplay. Opus 4.5 was already a step down in trying to play any character that didn't match its default personality

by dataspun

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by aster0id

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This is incredible research. So much harm can be prevented if this makes it into law. I hope it does. Kudos to the anthropic team for making this public.

by verdverm

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Anthropic should put the missing letters back so it is spelled correctly, Anthropomorphic. There is so much anthropomorphizing around this company and it's users... it's tiring