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Brex’s Prompt Engineering Guide

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51–60 of 112 posts

Re: Brex’s Prompt Engineering Guide

#51

I wonder if linguistic and English majors would end up benefiting in this trend of "prompt engineering."

Perhaps this may have been the case early on, but if you observe the trends especially with LLMs moving to zero shot, it's becoming progressively easier to express nuanced instructions with relatively simple prompts.

Re: Brex’s Prompt Engineering Guide

#52
post #18

Are there established best practices for "engineering" prompts systematically, rather than through trial-and-error? Editing prompts is like playing whack-a-mole: once you clear an edge case, a new problem pops up elsewhere. I'd really like to be able to say, "this new prompt performs 20% better across all our test cases". Because I haven't found a better way, I am building https://github.com/typpo/promptfoo , a CLI t…

I use observablehq notebooks so I have programming reactively attached.

https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/colossal-cave-chatgp...

Re: Brex’s Prompt Engineering Guide

#53
post #3

I wonder if linguistic and English majors would end up benefiting in this trend of "prompt engineering."

Perhaps, but this space suffers from the Armageddon astronaut/fire figher problem. It is easier to teach a Computer Science Major good english, than it is to teach an English Major computer science.

Don't think prompting LLMs require particularly "good" English in the first place. You can say a half baked sentence with typos and it'll still make sense of it.

Plus when you go meta and ask LLMs to generate prompts for themselves, you own language proficiency becomes even less important.

I do think English/language proficiency will help with Generative image AIs like Midjourney. Like if someone could describe a scene in extreme detail that's more likely to produce a result closer to what you want.

Re: Brex’s Prompt Engineering Guide

#54

I wonder if linguistic and English majors would end up benefiting in this trend of "prompt engineering."

For at least the next few months anyway.

The speed this stuff is moving prompt engineering may just be a fad and the next wave of models changes things again.

If they persist as a thing, then most of the hard work will just be abstracted away using a standard library of prompts available in a point and click fashion for 99% of use cases.

Re: Brex’s Prompt Engineering Guide

#55
This seems overall well-written and well-explained, but curious for that piece on fine-tuning. This article only recommends it as a last resort. That makes sense for a casual user, but if you're a company seriously using LLMs to provide services for your customers, wouldn't the cost of training data be offset by the potential gains you have and the edge cases you might automatically cover by fine-tuning instead of trying to whack-a-mole predict every single way the prompt can fail?

Re: Brex’s Prompt Engineering Guide

#56

This reflects astonishingly poorly on Brex. What customer wants to hear that Brex is using "a non-deterministic model" for "production use cases" like "staying on top of your expenses"? I don't see them acknowledge the downsides of that non-determinism anywhere, let alone hallucination, even though they mention the latter. Hallucinating an extra expense, or missing one, could have serious consequences. This is also p…

[flagged]

Re: Brex’s Prompt Engineering Guide

#57
post #36

Thanks very much for posting this! I haven't yet finished reading the whole thing, but even just the first section about the history of LLMs, explaining some of the basic concepts, etc., I found to be a very well-written and useful info, and it was really nice that it linked out to source material. So many times when you go into reading stuff about the latest AI technique or feature it can feel like you need to do a…

…was this written by an LLM? I’m starting to doubt anything on the internet that’s overly cherry and polite. Sigh.

We'll return to the age of laconic 90s snark, at least until bots start preloading with "Pretend you're an asshole teenager on the NYC subway in the 1990's, ...".

That or we kick into a world of ultra short lived memes, where the models will always lag. A rolling cipher of no-context memetic emojis to indicate someone is behind the keyboard.

Re: Brex’s Prompt Engineering Guide

#58
post #54

I wonder if linguistic and English majors would end up benefiting in this trend of "prompt engineering."

For at least the next few months anyway. The speed this stuff is moving prompt engineering may just be a fad and the next wave of models changes things again. If they persist as a thing, then most of the hard work will just be abstracted away using a standard library of prompts available in a point and click fashion for 99% of use cases.

Thats all I think when people espouse the "become a prompt engineer instead!" lines, as if the end goal isn't to remove that exact friction. Otherwise we'd be learning S-LLM-QL instead of "talking" to the bots.

Re: Brex’s Prompt Engineering Guide

#59
post #9

This is a question borne of ignorance: why does Brex, a bank, care about AI like this?

Hey there, I'm the author of the prompt engineering guide (and run Brex's Office of the CTO) – I can pull back the curtain a little bit.

I firmly believe that the introduction of LLMs will be as essential to the future of human-computer interaction as the introduction of the mouse and keyboard were. Every technology company with sufficient resources should be exploring the implications of LLMs on their business.

Most of our research for LLMs falls into three buckets:

1) Internal processes – Any area where an employee is writing or reading some kind of communication is up for grabs.

2) Developer productivity – Whether it's improving the quality of code, reducing time to implementation, or answering questions about our services and architecture... empowering our eng team with LLMs is an area of major interest.

3) Customer Experience – Employees frequently need to write memos for expenses or have questions about Travel & Expense policies (e.g. "Can I buy alcohol at this team dinner?").

We're, of course, exploring far more interesting use cases than just what's above, but that's the low hanging fruit.

Re: Brex’s Prompt Engineering Guide

#60
post #48

Worringly, I am it sure the people working on this really understand what a Transformer is Quote from them: “ There is still active research in non-transformer based language models though, such as Amazon’s AlexaTM 20B which outperforms GPT-3“ Quote from said paper “ For AlexaTM 20B, we used the standard Transformer model architecture“ (Its just an encoder decoder transformer)

Yeah, I think the (worrying) confusion is that Amazon calls it a seq2seq model, which was the name of a SOTA RNN from Google a while back.

Ofc now, seq2seq just means what you said (an encoder/decoder model, which is actually what a “truly vanilla” transformer would be anyway).

The fact that any serious researcher thinks any other serious researchers are using models without self attention is the real red flag here.

No one is trying to use other models anymore because they do not scale. There’s enough variety within transformers that you could argue we need a new level of taxonomy, but transformers are basically it for now.

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