Observation: Claude's system prompts seem to have grown rather large over time...

Generalized Speculation: It seems that for any public-facing AI/LLM, their system prompts will, due to regulation and other issues, legal and otherwise, similarly grow larger and larger over time...

Now, I'm all for responsible, well-tailored guardrails on public AI's/LLM's, but consider the following:

Every time a system prompt is expanded, the LLM's context window is commensurately reduced.

Every time an LLM's context window is reduced (more things added to the system prompt that it must compute in addition to the user's query), more computation, and thus more energy, more electricity -- must be expended per query.

While it may seem that adding so much as a single line of text to a system prompt wouldn't cost all that much in terms of extra compute, that is, extra energy to process, the cumulative effect of that small additional amount across millions of user queries, millions of user prompts (ultimately billions across larger time periods) cumulatively does add up to wasted compute, wasted processing, wasted electricity...

Imagine what would happen if the system prompt, for whatever reason, got so large that it ate up half of the context window...

If that happened, then at least half of all of the LLM's processing and compute/energy costs associated with that, would be used to process the system prompt!

Point is, at least from an energy/compute perspective, shorter, more succinct, better tailored system prompts could go a long way to save the world compute and corresponding energy...

Anyway, great link, and a very interesting web page!