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I agree and it always makes me think of how people interact with the ship’s computer in Star Trek. It never uses first person pronouns. Instead of “I can’t do that,” it says “unable to comply.” Instead of “I don’t know,” it says simply “unknown.”

In fact, seen in this light, it’s clear that the impersonal and non chatty tone of the ship computer is a better design for the task it was set up to do. How insufferable would it be if it was constantly responding to users with “That’s a great question. I can help you with that.”

The tone of LLMs only makes sense when you consider that they are intentionally set up to fool you into thinking there is a mind there. (And i guess also when you consider that they are designed to spend as many tokens as possible.)

? the firms use improvements in token economy as a selling point. of course they're not designed to spend as many as possible - spending an effectively unlimited amount would be easy to arrange, and would make them useless. come on.

they are designed to spend as few tokens as possible, though? frontier labs are benchmarking their models on how cheaply they can complete tasks