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by troupo 454 days ago
> It does require writing good instructions for the LLM to properly use the tables

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prompt engineering is nothing but an attempt to reverse-engineer a non-deterministic black box for which any of the parameters below are unknown:

- training set

- weights

- constraints on the model

- layers between you and the model that transform both your input and the model's output that can change at any time

- availability of compute for your specific query

- and definitely some more details I haven't thought of

https://dmitriid.com/prompting-llms-is-not-engineering

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1 comments
aargh_aargh 454 days ago
What else is engineering then if not taming the unknown and the unknowable? How is building a bridge any different? Do you know everything in advance about the composition of terrain, the traffic, the wind and the earthquakes? Or are you making educated guesses about unknown quantities to get something that fits into some parameters that are Good Enough(TM) for the given purpose?
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achierius 454 days ago
> and the unknowable

This is the crux. Sure, for high level software (e.g. Web apps), many parts of the system will feel like black boxes, but low-level software does not generally have this problem. Sure, sometimes you have to deal with a binary blob driver, but more often than not you're in control of or and to debug most all of the software running on your system.

> Building a bridge

There should NOT be significant unknowns when you're building a bridge, this is how people die. You turn those parameters into "knowns with high confidence", which is not something you can even begin to do for the LLM parameters described above.

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troupo 453 days ago
> How is building a bridge any different?

In absolutely every way that matters and in all the details that don't matter.

> Do you know everything in advance about the composition of terrain, the traffic, the wind and the earthquakes?

No, and there are established procedures and ways to establish those facts.

"This magical incantation that I pretend works better because the US is asleep and more compute is available" is not such a procedure.

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