[geoffmcc]

I checked out the archive and came across https://simon.datasette.cloud/data/chatgpt_public_messages?_...

I’m wondering if the archive missed something or what this random statement from the system is about. It seems to be telling itself who it is and setting a restriction on what it knows. I know if it’s not trained on data past a certain point, it cant know it, but still i wonder if you could intercept that and change the cutoff date (if even possible), would that have any effect on anything. But then again, I am probably reading to much into it because it seems to be coming from system.

2023-03-26 04:10:49 - [system] : You are ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI. Knowledge cutoff: 2021-09 Current date: 2023-03-25

[simonw]

That's called the system prompt - it's present at the start of every conversation, just to feed in some hints as to how the underlying model should behave.

If you play with the ChatGPT API in the OpenAI Playground developer tool you can set your own system prompt. I used it to create a sentient cheesecake that could answer questions about SQL using cheesecake-based examples yesterday.