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If telling Chat GPT that it has “decades of experience” leads to better results, why not say centuries of experience instead? If you don’t know how every token
by alehlopeh 4y ago
If telling Chat GPT that it has “decades of experience” leads to better results, why not say centuries of experience instead?
If you don’t know how every token of input affects the output, is engineering an accurate way to describe what you’re doing?
- FooBarWidget 4y agoI don't think the training data has works of centuries-old translators. > If you don’t know how every token of input affects the output, is engineering an accurate way to describe what you’re doing? We in fact don't know exactly. Prompt engineering seems to be a bag of tricks that change the probabilities of outputs. But I didn't invent the term.
- simonw 4y agoI don't think this is a strong argument against calling it "prompt engineering". Engineers have built systems based around things they didn't fully understand for centuries. We have learned an enormous amount about materials engineering and metallurgy since building the Brooklyn Bridge for example. If you don't fully understand how a system you are building on top of works, the engineering approach is to methodically experiment. That's what prompt engineering is. (One argument that works for not calling prompt engineering "engineering" is to point out that in many disciplines engineering requires certifications and licensing - the same reason people sometimes argue against "software engineering" as an engineering discipline.)
- Mezzie 4y agoBecause ChatGPT is pulling from the collective human digital linguistic consciousness and humans don't truthfully mention having centuries of experience. Whereas humans do talk about having decades of experience. Similar to how you could ask about near-death experiences but not about what it's like to have been dead for 5 years: There's no way for truthful information about that to reside in the dataset that the LLM is pulling from.
- rahidz 4y agoFor the same reason you're more likely to take me seriously if I say I have "decades of experience" versus "centuries of experience". Texts where someone has "centuries of experience" are likely to be fantasy or sci-fi, which bias against reliability.