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Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

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Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#111
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT taught me about vectors and other ways to dynamically create an array.

How do you know?

for a side project, it not only gave me the migrations, it suggested all the column names/datatypes, so basically I just said create me a laravel migration that's for an organization, this is a multi-tenant SaaS app, where an organization is basically a team, or tenant. You can think of these as companies as well, now make a migration that has columns that might generally be included in a company or organization.

It not only spit out the model but also the casts/fillable attributes on the model, as well. It even helped me work through an idea, that I didn't know what it was called, I was thinking it was EAV but instead it's metaform/metafields, to basically create something like how wordpress has the ability to dynamically create content 'types', django/wagtail can do this to, w/ chatgpt I think I've nailed down how to do this using polymorphism with the least amount of headache.

I'm wanting to create a CRM/CMS/ERP solution that can be very 'moldable' to different use cases, and this looks to be a good use, either way just being able to discuss with the ai my 'options', was like a major brain dump and increased the power of my flow.

YMMV, but if you can't get it to work like this, doesn't mean it doesn't, just means it doesn't for you, and while I can save 2-3 hours for every hour previously worked, that's valuable to me, esp as a freelancer who charges per project, not hourly.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#112
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crashes don’t mean terminal. If the dollar (or any other currency)lost 70% of its value in less than a year then we would certainly say it crashed

Disagree. At this point, BTC is very much known for its extremely high volatility (source: look at the price history since inception). There hasn't been a single year since it launched where it hasn't displayed outrageously wild swings: at this point, it's pretty clear that the wild volatility is an intrinsic attribute of this particular asset class. Therefore: not a crash, just Bitcoin's business as usual.

Crashes don’t have to be rare either- frequency does not negate them from being crashes

you can start by seeing some of the the accepted definitions here [1]

While you may have expected crashes in bitcoin to be that hard (good for you) most investors, dozens of high profile funds/exchanges/crypto businesses did not expect bitcoin to fall to 20k USD and have failed.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_market_crash

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#113
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Synthetic knowledge is still novel knowledge if you haven’t put the pieces together before.

Can you unpack "synthetic knowledge", cause I don't know what that really means.

New knowledge synthesized from existing knowledge. For example, you might know of A and B and maybe think that A -> B or B -> A based on their co-occurrence, but an AI might make you realize that C -> A as well as C -> B.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#114
post #64
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just software. It takes skill and labor to achieve the outputs you want. Is someone who uses photoshop all day not an artist? Or someone who writes text for a compiler not a programmer? You've got a huge blind spot if you think prompt engineer isn't already a thing.

>You've got a huge blind spot if you think prompt engineer isn't already a thing. It may be a "thing", because generating BS is a viable business model and ChatGPT makes it more efficient. ..but I submit as a working hypothesis, that it is completely impossible to gain knowledge you do not already possess from a language model, no matter how clever your prompting. I'm very interested in counter-examples, but I have s…

I don’t know how to homebrew. If I ask ChatGPT to help me get started homebrewing, it lists helpful steps to start homebrewing. I can ask it to expand on any of those steps until the breakdown is actionable.

Checking some of the facts it gives me against other sites it’s all correct, but better organized and more accessible. There’s your counter-example. This works for basically any well-documented process.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#115
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don’t think that’s Dunning-Kruger but I get what you’re saying.

Not? "After a few hours of playing with it I give the opinion that it can't be that hard" is kinda the essence of basically not having a clue but feeling competent to express such a judgement nevertheless.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#116
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’s Dunning-Kruger but I get what you’re saying.

Not? "After a few hours of playing with it I give the opinion that it can't be that hard" is kinda the essence of basically not having a clue but feeling competent to express such a judgement nevertheless.

Fair enough. I think at the time I felt that just one data point wasn't enough to evoke the effect. Maybe I'm just biased against the effect since it was dis-proven: https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#117
post #48
post #9

you can automatically learn soft prompts with backprop so.. the job "prompt engineering" isn't going to stick around for too long given it's automatable. https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06541 That is not to say, that integrating LLMs won't create a lot of jobs. Think of it as systems engineering. Knowing how computers work, as well as a software engineer does, will always be useful.

You still have to come up with the original prompt, though. Cool paper, BTW.

It's all prompts, all the way down.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#118
post #89
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A LLM is a generator of misinformation that is maximally difficult to distinguish from real information. How do you use this as a lawyer? I mean, as a stereotypical evil lawyer in a world of naïve people who don't learn from experience, you could maybe use it to win cases until you destroy the justice system. But other than that...

A LLM is a generator of misinformation This is a strange statement. No one is training LLMs to generate “misinformation”. It’s the opposite - it’s trained to generate the most likely next word, given the preceding 2000 words - using billions of examples from a real world training corpus. So it will try to generate as much information as what’s present in the corpus. Maybe even more, but that’s debatable.

>No one is training LLMs to generate “misinformation”.

That is phrased like it is stating a fact about the training process, but it is a statement about the intent of the training, isn't it? So I don't see it as rebutting my comment.

>It’s the opposite - it’s trained to generate the most likely next word

Sure, of course, what else? But if you take any correct statement about something and modify it slightly, it's not very likely it will still be correct.

It seems intuitive to me that there are going to be a million billion (understatement) wrong things next to anything correct in the inputs. As a sort of combinatorial, mathematical thing. You just (in principle) count all the ways to be wrong that are similar to being right.

Nobody trained it to get anything right! It doesn't matter what people expect if they don't have a procedure to do it.

If a statement is adjacent to things that are also "correct", that almost implies a lack of information in the original statement. It seems born out in the impressive BS'ing - the key to BS'ing is saying things that can't really be wrong.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#119
post #97
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT-3 certainly isn't 100% accurate, but neither is it so perfectly unreliable that no one could ever get it to produce a relevant fact not in the prompt. I think I understand the sense in which you claim it produces relevant facts not in the prompt. It's not that we differ on easily observable behavior of the system. It's that I question if GPT-3 is "producing" these identifiable facts, and if the user is "produci…

>It's that I question if GPT-3 is "producing" these identifiable facts, and if the user is "producing" them instead, whether they can possibly be "relevant". I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That GPT-3 is just vomiting stuff up out of its training set and not producing any new knowledge? But that's totally irrelevant to the issue of whether it can transmit knowledge to a user, who presumably hasn't memorized t…

>That GPT-3 is just vomiting stuff up out of its training set and not producing any new knowledge?

Hmm. Seems obvious to me that it's producing new output, but that output isn't knowledge and it can't be.

Sometimes ChatGPT tells me something that turns out to be correct and relevant. And I get excited, and then I Google it and what it told me is the first hit on Stack Overflow.

There's a subtle point here, that other people might say "well, ChatGPT is ok, but no better than Google" or something like that. But I differ on that. The key is that I don't know it's Stack Overflow until I check independently. So it's giving it too much credit to say it's as good as Google, and the amount of information it can output is not lower bounded by its training set, but is actually zero due to being adjacent to an infinite amount of BS that by its nature always requires external mechanisms to separate out.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#120
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know?

for a side project, it not only gave me the migrations, it suggested all the column names/datatypes, so basically I just said create me a laravel migration that's for an organization, this is a multi-tenant SaaS app, where an organization is basically a team, or tenant. You can think of these as companies as well, now make a migration that has columns that might generally be included in a company or organization. It…

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