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AI In Plain English, For Normal People. PART 5.b

AI In Plain English, For Normal People. PART 5.b

Is Prompt Engineering worth it?

Rafa TV
February 10, 2024

We continue with the best guide to understand AI and don't get behind in the future!

Last week, we talked about the ChatGPT interface, and we introduced the RICCE framework to show that for better results, it is better to have a certain structure to follow when we are having an interaction with a LLMs. In this one, we will go through:

The essence of Prompt Engineering
Tips for better results and helpful tools
Why prompt engineering is important

And as always, at the bottom, you have a selection of the news of the week to stay updated and spark your curiosity, as well as cool tools and lessons that can enhance your life.

That’s damn right!

Prompt engineering mindset

How good are your googling skills now as opposed to five years ago? Probably better.

We have been using this tool for 20–25 years. At the beginning of Google, few people knew how to make the most of it.

I use ChatGPTW all the time, and I believe everyone will eventually. Why don't we start now to be good at it and be at an advantage?

The essence of prompt engineering

I make my wife go crazy when I ask her stuff like, “Did you finish?” "Did I finish what?” “Did you like it?” “Did I like what?”

As you can see, there is a lack of information in there. I assume that the receptor will understand me without providing enough context.

Before starting, let me tell you that for a guy like me who struggles to communicate and use language correctly, and that has dislexia, this has been an eye-opening tool.

Prompt engineering is the art of communicating with a generative large-language model.

The more context the model has about why you are doing what you are doing or what your goals are, the better its suggestions are going to be.

You have to be able to ask the correct question in the correct format and in the right context. With proper prompting, you will reduce the percentage of error and even surpass other more specific, fine-tuned models made for specific tasks instead of general-purpose models

Knowing how to prompt well can improve your ability to be accurate with your communication.

Prompting as a skill is no different than the ability to communicate efficiently with humans. This, in turn, makes reading, writing, and speaking more important as human skills.

Is prompt engineering still worth learning?

Think about it like this: what constitutes the main design of an algorithm is efficiency; the main principle of new business models like Google is efficiency; AI and robots are created based on this principle; society is going to be reimagined based on efficiency.

It will help us to start to think and communicate accordingly, so we can thrive and flow in it.

In my case, it helps me be more clear in my communication skills. Linguistics are key to prompt engineering, and they help you understand the nuances of language and how it is used in different contexts, improving our regular human communication.

Is it worth it? Absolutely.

On the other hand, some people refer to it as a bug instead of a tool that will eventually disappear (read more about this here), but it will still be around for the next few years.

In time, the ability of the models to craft accurate responses will reduce the demand for crafting amazing prompts, but I think that the basics of any prompting are skills that we can adapt into our own communication skills, and they are going to be the basis of future communication with AI and robots.

Next week I will present a summary of current practices and prompting tricks to improve LLM output, expanding on the idea of having a framework in mind to talk to these things!

So, stay tuned, and

Stay Kind