How to talk to machines: 10 secrets of prompt engineering
Just a few years ago, a prompt was something English teachers used for homework assignments, which filled up weekends and kept students inside on sunny days. Now it seems we’re all teachers, tasked with distributing perfect prompts that direct large language models to do our bidding. These prompts are also endowed with the power to ruin weekends, but it’s not the machines that are suffering.
The power of prompts can seem downright magical. We toss off a few words that approximate a human language and, voila! Back comes a nicely formatted, well-structured answer to whatever question we asked. No topic is too obscure and no fact is out of our reach. At least as long as it’s part of the training corpus and approved by the model’s shadowy controllers.