How is Developer Message Better than System Prompt

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“ * Developer messages : Specify instructions or context for the model to follow, such as defining tone, style and other behavioral guidance.”

As this is being announced as a new feature, what actually separates it from the System Prompt and does it actually differ technically from System Prompt or is this just the new nomenclature for what still essentially is just the system primer?

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First off, sorry about this—we didn’t make this change very clear.

  • Developer messages was designed for our o-series models (e.g., o1).
  • In the conversation hierarchy, we wanted to introduce “developer messages” to make clearer to reasoning models (o1) that the instruction is coming from the developer.
  • For o1, system messages will auto-convert to developer messages.
  • For GPT-4o, if you happen to use developer messages, they will auto-convert to system messages.
  • Basically, they’re both forwards and backwards compatible.

Does this help make things more sense? You can read more about how the model treats the developer and user message role hierarchy in our model spec: Model Spec (2024/05/08).

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Thank you @edwinarbus! Much appreciated.

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I guess this does not help me understand any differences. For now, they are synonyms, but will they be discrete later? will there be a time where you send both a “system” and a “developer” prompt to an o1 model?