It was a throwaway comment that journalists desperate to write about AI leapt upon. It has as much meaning as when you see “Actor says new film is great!” articles on entertainment sites. People writing meaningless blather because they’ve got clicks to farm.
> yet they have system prompts that take 10 minutes for a human to read through.
The system prompts are cached, the endless variations on how people choose to be polite aren’t.
My primary takeaway from the previous comment was not the reference to corporate annoyance, but the question of how to assess overly verbose replies. I can see that, on a large scale, those outputs might end up consuming a lot of human time and attention, which could (maybe) be mitigated.
The second line of Claude's system prompt contains the date and time. I wonder if they update the cache every minute then. And if it wouldn't have made more sense to put it at the bottom, and cache everything above it.
That’s a good point, however what it actually says is:
> The current date is {{currentDateTime}}.
The prose part refers to the date alone. The variable name is ambiguous. Although it says currentDateTime, in Python even though there’s a date class, it’s pretty common to use datetime objects even if all you need is the date. So depending on how that’s formatted, it could include the time, or it could just be the date.
They aren’t annoyed. The only thing that happened was that somebody wondered how much it cost, and Sam Altman responded:
> tens of millions of dollars well spent--you never know
— https://x.com/sama/status/1912646035979239430
It was a throwaway comment that journalists desperate to write about AI leapt upon. It has as much meaning as when you see “Actor says new film is great!” articles on entertainment sites. People writing meaningless blather because they’ve got clicks to farm.
> yet they have system prompts that take 10 minutes for a human to read through.
The system prompts are cached, the endless variations on how people choose to be polite aren’t.