Learn to Spell: Prompt Engineering (LLM Bootcamp)

New course announcement ✨

We're teaching an in-person LLM bootcamp in the SF Bay Area on November 14, 2023. Come join us if you want to see the most up-to-date materials building LLM-powered products and learn in a hands-on environment.

Hope to see some of you there!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In this video, Charles gives high-level intuitions and a default playbook for prompting language models. We consider two very different sources of intuition: "language models are statistical models of text" and "prompts are magic spells". Then, we review prompting techniques, like decomposition, reasoning, and reflection.

00:00 Intro
02:15 Language models are statistical models of text
04:50 But "statistical model" gives bad intuition
08:35 Prompts are magic spells
09:57 Prompts are portals to alternate universes
16:42 A prompt can make a wish come true
23:03 A prompt can create a golem
27:10 Limitations of LLMs as simulators
32:17 Prompting techniques are mostly tricks
33:40 Few-shot learning isn't the right model for prompting
37:40 Character-level operations are hard
40:23 The prompting playbook: reasoning, reflection, & ensembling

[Zoronoa]

around 1:00 you talked about a lecture you did in the morning, is there a video of that lecture?

[zacboyles]

19:00 - at what point does eliminating the “undesirable social biases” make the model seem ignorant? Worse than that, it seems dangerous to get into a habit of hiding probabilistic realities that cause some to feel uncomfortable instead of unleashing bright minds to create solutions for them - assuming the ‘afflicted’ desire a solution in the first place. Sure, some tennis shoe customer service chat bot doesn’t matter but it’s not going to stop there.

[oleksandrasaskia]

I love this talk! So easy to follow, so fun, with humor, and I especially appreciate down-to-earth explanations and parallels.

I am impressed by how great of a teacher Charles Frye is! The content is very informative and easy to comprehend. Thank you very much!

[edwardsmarcom]

This is great. His voice and intonation sounds just like comedian David Cross.

[ArtOfTheProblem]

Really great lessons I'm impressed, would love to work with you

[arvj]

I can't believe this is for free. Thank you. I probably need to watch this video one more time to get a better understanding. Some information just breezed past my head. :D

[agenticmark]

Prompts are certainly magic incantations. The difference between the new wizard and the old wizard is the ability to say the spell correctly :D Prompting is very much like hacking out programs. The more you have a "conversation" with your code/tools, the better your results are. The more you have a conversation with GPT, the more that "clicks" and your prompts get better which leads to the models giving you better results!

I find my lack of higher maths to be a boon in prompt engineering because I make less assumptions not based on the responses of my experiments and journey.

Great talk!

[theoqudatq]

Not a very useful presentation. I learnt nothing new. No "magic" recipe.

[mydaisy]

What a valuable video it is.. thanks for sharing your knowledge... :)