3 ms·
I kind of dislike the term "Prompt Engineering". It mystifies what to me is an ordinary process. I'm not talking about chanting magic words, i'm just talking ab
by famouswaffles 3y ago
I kind of dislike the term "Prompt Engineering". It mystifies what to me is an ordinary process. I'm not talking about chanting magic words, i'm just talking about taking the structure of an LLM into account, even taking how humans would approach the problem into account.
In microsoft's agi paper, there is a test for planning they put out for GPT-4. They give detailed instructions on the constraint of a poem and expect it to spit out the constrained poem in one shot. Of course it fails and the conclusion is that it can't plan. But if you think about it, this is a ridiculous assertion. No human on earth would have passed that test with working memory alone. Even by our standards, it's a weird way to present the information but they did so anyway. This is actually a major issue for most plan benchmark assessment for LLMs i've come across.
These are the kind of problems i'm talking about. If i changed the request to encourage for a draft/revise generation process and it consistently passed these tests then it's very fair to say it can plan. That's not "hacky". It's just truth. and saying otherwise is denying real world usage for a misplaced sense of propriety to benchmarks. a benchmark is only as useful as the capabilities it can assess.
a "this is how this is presented, this is how the model performed" would have been very prudent in my opinion. Maybe these guys already covered the kind of things i'm talking about(i can accept that!)....but i can't know that if they don't tell us.
- haskellandchill 3y agohow is "Engineering" "about chanting magic words"? The wires may be getting crossed on if it's an engineering discipline or just the use of the word engineer, meaning to build mindfully, I feel the latter is appropriate and the former more misguided but still it's not "Prompt Wizarding" ;)
- famouswaffles 3y agoFair Enough. Just that discussion around the term feels like that sometimes especially with image generation.
- Guthur 3y agoWell you're building nothing, your poking at a black box and hoping it spits out something close to what you want.
- pietro72ohboy 3y agoPrecisely! You’re trying to learn the art of poking the box in the right way. As an engineer, I really despise the bastardisation of the term to refer to jobs or tasks that are inherently non-scientific.
- elforce002 3y agoI agree with you a 100%
- haskellandchill 3y agoIt can be done scientifically, there are many techniques in the literature that put the engineering into Prompt Engineering.