[hnfong]

Do you have examples of people failing to get a good response from chatgpt because of bad prompts? I’m asking because at least for simple cases I can often just give it a very terse request and usually it will attempt to guess what I mean and give a reasonable answer. If not I can fix it with a follow up question.

My intuition is that language models have read terabytes of random internet data, and while presumably most developers of LLMs try to find high quality data, the models generally do ingest quite a bit of random stuff, and they try to make sense of those too, so in terms of understanding they are probably better than the strictness in format that we programmers are used to.

Of course the token thing is probably significant, but my understanding is that it affects the result only when you misspell your words(?)