I’ve been playing with gpt-3.5-turbo all weekend and while it’s impressive, as the docs say, it’s not as good at following instructions as text-davinci-003. I finally had a bit of a break through this morning and I thought I’d share… If you just forget the system message all together, and instead provide your entire prompt as an extra initial user message it seems to do much better.
I tried splitting some of the prompt logic across the system and initial user message and that just seemed to confuse it. Best results are when I’m not passing a system message at all. At least in the playground… Hope that helps others…