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by jstanley 1072 days ago
That's definitely begging the question.

If you're prepared to accept that GPT-4 can answer questions just as well as humans can, why do you even need to do prompt engineering?

2 comments

Humans still need 'prompt engineering' to answer questions more accurately though.

* What's the best way to get to Radio Shack from here?

is not the same as

* What's the easiest way to get to Radio Shack from memory when riding a bicycle from here?

Easiest way to get to Radio Shack on a bicycle is to ride that bike down to Doc Brown’s house, charge the Delorean up to 1.21 gigawatts, and go back in time.
Humans benefit from good communication too. For example, annual U.S. deaths from medical errors is in the hundreds of thousands. Much of it is due to miscommunication. Is this akin to poor human-to-human prompt engineering? Of course, humans will rush and not attempt better communication, and you can take all the time you wish with an AI. And AI will continue to incorporate better prompt engineering that you won't have to write out. But there will always be a continuum from good to bad for communication, and communication outcomes.
You're forgetting what you may consider to be factual, self-evident and a priori is your opinion.

You may be under the impression that annual U.S. deaths from medical errors being in the hundreds of thousands miscommunicates but that is truly your opinion. You are merely jumping to conclusions at places another person might not.

And going on to rely on the LLM to validate your perspective is a lossy process. It may not lose your perspective but it loses someone else's and you don't even seem to notice or care.

This is an excellent example.

The post you replied to was saying that the deaths were caused by miscommunication, but you interpreted it to mean that stating the number of such deaths is somehow a miscommunication itself!

Doesn't help that I had just recently woken up but yes, most definitely.