Instruction Following With System Prompts

via “instruction-following with custom system prompt format”

Mistral's 123B flagship model rivaling GPT-4o.

Unique: Dedicated system prompt format with special tokens and attention masking prioritizes instructions over user input, reducing prompt injection risk and improving instruction adherence vs standard chat templates used by competitors

vs others: More robust instruction following than GPT-4o's system message format because special tokenization prevents user input from overriding system directives, and simpler than Claude's system prompt which requires careful phrasing to avoid conflicts