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My experience is that LLMs are really good at interpreting prompts, so you really don't have to craft them any way to get "better" results. The most important

My experience is that LLMs are really good at interpreting prompts, so you really don't have to craft them any way to get "better" results. The most important part is that the prompt has the necessary information so that it can be interpreted correctly. The other important part is, if you're trying to get a response you can feed to a computer (e.g. raw JSON), you need to really clearly specify this. And even then the current LLMs are really bad at stopping or providing invalid output; so bad, we may need to create another type of language model which takes LLM "English" output and converts it into raw data. LLMs are (or at least GPT-4 is) also really good at selective attention. Even if you slip in a subtle detail the model is good at picking it up.

zvmaz 4y ago
> My experience is that LLMs are really good at interpreting prompts, so you really don't have to craft them any way to get "better" results. That's my impression. I just write what I want chatGPT to do, and eventually refine according to the answers. Why has "engineering" been added to "prompt"? Why not simply "prompting writing"? Or "Better prompt writing"? (is it not simply equivalent to "how to write better")?
- kayge 4y ago
  Because 'xyz engineering' consultants can charge a lot more $$$, and 'xyz writers' are all being replaced by AI ;)
sp332 4y ago
That is important, but asking in certain ways can make a big difference. E.g. https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1645562198935347205 https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1645562198935347205. And just putting “let’s think step by step” at the end can really help some of the larger GPT models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Since the response becomes part of the prompt, asking it to think step by step is in effect recursive prompt engineering.

zvmaz 4y ago

> My experience is that LLMs are really good at interpreting prompts, so you really don't have to craft them any way to get "better" results. That's my impression. I just write what I want chatGPT to do, and eventually refine according to the answers. Why has "engineering" been added to "prompt"? Why not simply "prompting writing"? Or "Better prompt writing"? (is it not simply equivalent to "how to write better")?

kayge 4y ago
Because 'xyz engineering' consultants can charge a lot more $$$, and 'xyz writers' are all being replaced by AI ;)

sp332 4y ago

That is important, but asking in certain ways can make a big difference. E.g. https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1645562198935347205 https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1645562198935347205. And just putting “let’s think step by step” at the end can really help some of the larger GPT models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Since the response becomes part of the prompt, asking it to think step by step is in effect recursive prompt engineering.