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> For what it's worth, I've been using something similar with my prompts and felt the completions did a poor job of honoring this, but do a better job when asked to use words instead of characters.

Yes, restricting by characters is hard for GPT-style LLMs because they work in tokens, not characters.

Thanks, that's a good pickup -I'll refine my prompt.

But LLM have little concept of tokens don't they? Or at least well not know what their tokenizes is like.

It can understand word boundaries, though. A space is its own token and there are special tokens for common words prefixed with a space or common word prefixes with a space in front, ex “ a”

Imagine asking a person to give a verbal response in 250 characters or less. They could do it, but it would be a lot of work. Even saying less than 50 words is hard.

If you actually have a hard cap, you’ll have to give feedback. If it’s just you don’t want an essay, it works great to say something like “a few sentences”. And as always, examples help a ton.

GPT-4 does a much better job at paying attention to details in prompts