Mastodawn

Drew Harwell Feb 25, 2023

New: Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required. Prompt engineers sweet-talk GPT-3 and other generative-AI tools using plain English - a revolution in how humans work with machines. But this "tech priesthood" may only have the illusion of control. How long will their incantations last?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/25/prompt-engineers-techs-next-big-job/

Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required.

Proponents of the growing field argue that the early weirdness of AI chatbots can be avoided by a human giving the machine all the right instructions.

The Washington Post

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Jesse Feb 25, 2023

@drewharwell Ok, what I don’t understand is why prompts are delivered in the second person. In almost all the examples in English of a character description followed by that character acting according to the description, it’s written in the third person — right? Is the training corpus just stuffed with like 20% cheesy hypnosis scenes?

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Giovanni Campagna

@misc @drewharwell it's the result of instruction finetuning + RLHF finetuning. Prompts change a lot compared to original pretraining. Also, even in the original corpus 2nd person was common for coding-interview-style text, which used to be easy to accidentally retrieve asking for a logic problem or a problem with structured output.