Thing is, they don't "disregard instructions" at all. "Instructions" aren't part of their universe. It's completely orthogonal.
"Instructions" are just more tokens of context to complete. It is purely 100% a game of linguistics.
Prompts, skills, system messages, are all context, the pattern to be extended.
What trips us up is that it *sounds* like it is listening, processing, and doing things with concepts.
But only insofar as those concepts are encoded into next tokens.
@pseudonym @tante I know in the lower level it works like that, but models are still trained to react to instruction-like sequences so that it would be meaningful for humans to think in terms of giving instructions and getting the model to follow them.
It's a leaky abstraction, even more so that some other abstractions. But still one that in my view exists and what people build on. Or at least attempt to.