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"Prompt engineering" is a made up thing. There's not some magic William Gibson prompt cowboy who through some innate intuition can master prompts the way nobody

"Prompt engineering" is a made up thing. There's not some magic William Gibson prompt cowboy who through some innate intuition can master prompts the way nobody else can. It's a deterministic model. There's plenty of interesting explainability work, or however you want to frame it, to be done understanding the connection between different prompts and outputs. But it's clearly in the province of real ML researchers who have experience on the area, and will approach it scientifically. 335k for someone good at that is not unusual at all, they have lots of options.

cameronfraser 4y ago
Prompt engineering is more prompt chaining which is actively being researched so it is a thing. https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain
- version_five 4y ago
  Point is, there's some black box, lay-version of playing with prompts, and there's a real study of how the prompt affects output by people who understand the workings of the model. Presumably they're hiring for the latter and not some kid with intuition, and therefore the headline is sensational because the story is that a job for a highly educated and specialized scientist pays well. Edit: but when you read the ignorant comments like It's possible that prompt engineering will become the next higher level of abstraction above scripting languages, which means it will have its own ecosystem develop around it while introducing a new audience to the technical domain. It's clear that some people think prompting is really a dark art and not something that people could actually understand how it works. It's indicative of the overall ignorance around what llms are (like the deterministic guy in the sibling comment)
EForEndeavour 4y ago
> It's a deterministic model What is? Aren't large language models very specifically not deterministic? It's impossible to reliably predict their response to a given prompt until you actually run the prompt, even with the temperature parameter set to zero (and often temperature is higher than zero in practical deployments).

cameronfraser 4y ago

Prompt engineering is more prompt chaining which is actively being researched so it is a thing. https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain

version_five 4y ago
Point is, there's some black box, lay-version of playing with prompts, and there's a real study of how the prompt affects output by people who understand the workings of the model. Presumably they're hiring for the latter and not some kid with intuition, and therefore the headline is sensational because the story is that a job for a highly educated and specialized scientist pays well. Edit: but when you read the ignorant comments like It's possible that prompt engineering will become the next higher level of abstraction above scripting languages, which means it will have its own ecosystem develop around it while introducing a new audience to the technical domain. It's clear that some people think prompting is really a dark art and not something that people could actually understand how it works. It's indicative of the overall ignorance around what llms are (like the deterministic guy in the sibling comment)

EForEndeavour 4y ago

> It's a deterministic model What is? Aren't large language models very specifically not deterministic? It's impossible to reliably predict their response to a given prompt until you actually run the prompt, even with the temperature parameter set to zero (and often temperature is higher than zero in practical deployments).