Should we really call it "engineering" if its a case of "try random things until one of them works without really knowing why"?
Hasn't software "engineering" been like that forever?
GPT-Prompt-Engineer
31–40 of 166 posts
Re: GPT-Prompt-Engineer
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's called machine learning.
Gradient descent type optimization is far from "trying random things until one of them works without really knowing why". You can calculate all partial derivatives and understand the impact.
To a layperson like me, the "try random things" part of machine learning doesn't seem to lie in optimizing the parameters, but in designing the model.
Re: GPT-Prompt-Engineer
#33Should we really call it "engineering" if its a case of "try random things until one of them works without really knowing why"?
Looks more like science here. Run a bunch of experiments and see which does better. But literally the first sentence of the readme is "Prompt engineering is kind of like alchemy."
> Run a bunch of experiments and see which does better.
That's empiricism. Scientific method implies formulating falsifiable theoretical claims, producing meaningful analysis of experimental conditions, publishing peer-reviewed and reproducible results.
Re: GPT-Prompt-Engineer
#34Isn’t engineering an exact science while prompt engineering is completely not?
Although, even software engineering being an exact science, it is a funny one: most of us don’t get certified as like, let’s say, mechanical engineers do. Would they say we are engineers?
So perhaps the “engineer” term got overloaded in recent years?
Re: GPT-Prompt-Engineer
#35Doug Adams would've had so much fun these days.
His genius laid in not only seeing which technologies were coming, but predicting what perversions business people would twist it into.
Creating a computer to find "the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything", getting a cryptic answer and then creating an even bigger and more complicated computer to find the question is a pretty good satire of generative ai based chatbots of exponentially increasing model size.
Re: GPT-Prompt-Engineer
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gradient descent type optimization is far from "trying random things until one of them works without really knowing why". You can calculate all partial derivatives and understand the impact.
I think it is a freaking miracle it even works. I understand how it works for say 100 parameter linear regression, but that it would work for billions of parameters (billion dimensional space) by nudging the parameters each a little (based on purely it's impact on the loss, assuming everything stays the same), is not obvious to me. It is a kind of magic. Regarding randomness, the initialization of the weights is rand…
What’s even crazier is the fact that the underlying numerical math solution was exposed early 1800’s by Gauss!
Re: GPT-Prompt-Engineer
#37Isn’t engineering an exact science while prompt engineering is completely not? Although, even software engineering being an exact science, it is a funny one: most of us don’t get certified as like, let’s say, mechanical engineers do. Would they say we are engineers? So perhaps the “engineer” term got overloaded in recent years?
what does “exact” mean?
If we are being pedantic and literal, this is exact in the sense that for identical seeds you get identical results.
Re: GPT-Prompt-Engineer
#38Isn’t engineering an exact science while prompt engineering is completely not? Although, even software engineering being an exact science, it is a funny one: most of us don’t get certified as like, let’s say, mechanical engineers do. Would they say we are engineers? So perhaps the “engineer” term got overloaded in recent years?
I am a Software Engineer, I am certified (since in my country, they do so, just as with Mechanical Engineers). Still think it's overloaded though.
Re: GPT-Prompt-Engineer
#39Isn’t engineering an exact science while prompt engineering is completely not? Although, even software engineering being an exact science, it is a funny one: most of us don’t get certified as like, let’s say, mechanical engineers do. Would they say we are engineers? So perhaps the “engineer” term got overloaded in recent years?
Anyway, the best engineer for ChatGPT prompt can be ChatGPT itself.
People seem to think that “automation will create new jobs”, but in the age or AI, those job opprtunities will be very temporary as the companies making the AI automate that thin layer.
Similarly, people think that humans will control AIs. That’s a bit quaint, a bit like humans controlling a corporation. The thin layer of “control” can be easily swapped out and present an improvement in the market, so that the number of totally autonomous (no human in the loop) workflows will grow.
That can include predictive policing with Palantir (thanks Peter Thiel!), autonomous killbots in war etc. Seeing how reckless companies have been in releasing the current AI in an arms race, I don’t see how they would be restrained in a literal arms race of slaughterbot swarms and panopticon camera meshes.
PS: I remember this exact phase when computers like Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov. For a while he and others advocated “centaurs” — humans collaborating with computers. But the last decade hardly anyone will claim that a system with humans in the loop can beat a system that’s fully automated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess
Re: GPT-Prompt-Engineer
#40Isn’t engineering an exact science while prompt engineering is completely not? Although, even software engineering being an exact science, it is a funny one: most of us don’t get certified as like, let’s say, mechanical engineers do. Would they say we are engineers? So perhaps the “engineer” term got overloaded in recent years?
Software engineer has always been a daft, grandiose term that seems aimed at prestige rather than reality in the majority of cases.
If coders can call themselves engineers, no reason why anybody else solving puzzles for a living can't.