In the system message window of the Playground, if untouched it shows a grayed-out default ‘You are a helpful assistant’. If left blank, is this automatically used as the default system message? Or is it just a suggestion and there is no system message used if the text box is left blank?
I think that might be the a default system message for a playground call, though I have never had a confirmation for it
If you inspect network traffic in Playground it looks like its a standard API call and does not send “You are a helpful assistant” as the system prompt
{
"messages": [{
"role": "user",
"content": "hi"
}],
"temperature": 0.7,
"max_tokens": 256,
"top_p": 1,
"frequency_penalty": 0,
"presence_penalty": 0,
"model": "gpt-3.5-turbo",
"stream": true
}
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Yes, it is just a fill-in suggestion. It is a blank System role - and in this case, the System role is still present, but it is handled by the AI platform behind the scenes - accordingly OpenAI policies - without the user having to interact with it directly.
The System role can be used for context maintenance in such a way there is no need to repeat all the instructions repeatedly - saving tokens - in every single prompt during a conversation.
IMHO, "You are this... or that" is a more funny example of the use of the System role for beginners similar to "Hello, world!" in some old computers and software.
Some GPT-3.5 models give low importance to the System role being necessary a reminder in the User prompt such as Please follow the instructions provided in System role. Keep the instructions in context during this conversation - or something like that.
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