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Why do people use “you” in a system prompt? Is that correct for openai models?

SP is usually a preface for a dialog in local models, e.g.:

  This is a conversation between A and User. A is X and Y and tends to Z. User knows H and J, also aware of KL. They know each other well. 

  A: Hi. 
What this is as a whole is a document/protocol where A talks with User. You can read it as a novel or a meeting protocol and make sense of it. If you put “you” into this preface, it makes no semantic sense and the whole document now reads as a novel which starts by shouting something at its reader and then going to a dialog.


It's due to how the RLHF and instruction tuning was done. IIRC, even the builtin system prompt works this way in ChatGPT.




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