Excuse me? Step by step wasn't paper-worthy? Hard disagree. LLM research is currently in its infancy, because they are no older than a few years old. And a research field in its infancy is bound to have a few noteworthy "no sh*t, Sherlock" papers that would be obvious from hindsight. The fact is, LLMs are a higher-order construct in machine learning, much like a fish is higher-order than a simple cellular colony. Low…
Instinctively a prompt may look like one line of code. We can often know or prove what a compiler is doing, but higher dimensional space is just not understood in the same way.
What other engineered thing in history has had this much immediately useful emergent capability? Genetic algorithms finding antenna designs and flocking algorithms are fantastic, but I would argue narrower in scope.
Of course a paper is still expected to expand knowledge, to have rigor and impact, but I don’t see why a prompt centric contribution would inherently preclude this.