  Given the impressive capabilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs), we
investigate and benchmark the most popular proprietary and different sized open
source models on the task of explicit instruction following in conflicting
situations, e.g. overrides. These include the ability of the model to override
the knowledge within the weights of the model, the ability to override (or
moderate) extracted knowledge in the prompt, and lastly the ability to perform
a full jailbreak. Experimentation performed suggest several key findings to
improve instruction following - larger models perform the best in following
instructions that override internal and contextual instructions, and are
obedient, even to a fault. When scaling to longer contexts via rope scaling, a
significant buffer needs to be maintained from the edge of the perplexity cliff
in order to maintain instruction following capabilities. Finally, we observe
improving instruction following, and subsequently instruction
overrides/jailbreaks, is fundamentally at odds with the ability of a language
model to follow given safety filters or guidelines. Thus, we postulate the most
effective approach for safe, trustworthy AI should be dealt external to the LLM
itself.
