Why prompt engineering is one of the most valuable skills today

In a world that is rapidly embracing large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering has emerged as a new skill to unlocking their full potential. Think of it as the language to speak with these intelligent AI systems, enabling us to tap into their vast capabilities and reshape how we create, work, solve problems and do much more. It can allow anyone — including your grandma — to program a complex multi-billion parameter AI system in the cloud.

LLMs are fundamentally built on deep learning algorithms and architectures. They are trained on massive datasets of text. Like a human who has devoured countless books, LLMs learn patterns, grammar, relationships and reasoning abilities from data. Internal settings can be tuned to change how the model processes information and adjusted to improve accuracy. When given a prompt at the inferencing stage, the LLMs use their learned knowledge and parameters to generate the most probable and contextually relevant output. It is because of these prompts that the LLMs can generate human-quality text, hold conversations, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content and answer questions in an informative way.

Many free (open source) LLMs and paid (closed source) hosted LLM services are available today. LLMs are transforming every industry as well as every aspect of our lives. Here’s how:

Customer service: Powerful AI chatbots provide instant support and answer customer queries.

Education: Personalized learning experiences and AI tutors are available.

Healthcare: LLMs are being used to analyze medical issues, accelerate drug discovery and personalize treatment plans.

Marketing and content creation: LLMs can generate engaging marketing copy, website content and scripts for videos.

Software development: LLMs are assisting developers with code generation, debugging and documentation.

Important prompt types and techniques

Prompts act as a guiding light for LLMs. A well-crafted prompt can significantly impact the quality and relevance of the output of LLMs. Imagine asking a personal assistant to “make a reservation for dinner.” Depending on how much information you provide, such as preferred cuisine or time, you will get a more accurate result. Prompt engineering is the art and science of crafting prompts to elicit desired outputs from AI systems. It involves designing and refining prompts to generate accurate, relevant and creative outputs that align with the user’s intent.

Let us delve deeper by looking at prompt engineering techniques that can help a user guide LLMs toward desired outcomes.

From practice, prompts could be broadly classified as falling into one of the following categories:

Direct prompts: These are small direct instructions, such as “Translate ‘hello’ into Spanish.”

Contextual prompts: A bit more context is added to small direct instructions. Such as, “I am writing a blog post about the benefits of AI. Write a catchy title.”

Instruction-based prompts: These are elaborate instructions with specific details of what to do and what not to do. For instance, “Write a short story about a talking cat. The cat should be grumpy and sarcastic.”

Examples-based prompts: Prompters might say, “Here’s an example of a haiku: An old silent pond / A frog jumps into the pond— / Splash! Silence again. Now, write your own haiku.”

The following are important techniques that have been proven to be very effective in prompt engineering:

Iterative refinement: This involves continuously refining prompts based on the AI’s responses. It can lead to better results. Example: You might start with “Write a poem about a sunset.” After seeing the output, refine it to “Write a melancholic poem about a sunset at the beach.”

Chain of thought prompting: Encouraging step-by-step reasoning can help solve complex problems. Example: Instead of just a complex prompt like “A farmer has 14 tractors, eight cows and 10 chickens. If he sells half his birds and buys 3 more cows, how many animals would give him milk?”, adding “Think step by step” or “Explain your reasoning” is likely to give much better results and even clearly point out any intermediate errors that the model could have made.

Role-playing: This means assigning a role or persona to the AI before handing it the task. Example: “You are a museum guide. Explain the painting Vista from a Grotto by David Teniers the Younger.”

Multi-turn prompting: This involves breaking down a complex task into a series of prompts. This technique involves using a series of prompts to guide the AI to the required answer. Example: “Create a detailed outline,” followed by “Use the outline to expand each point into a paragraph,” followed by “The 2nd paragraph is missing X. Rewrite it to focus on…” and then finally completing the piece.

Challenges and opportunities in prompt engineering

There are some challenges and opportunities in prompt engineering. Although they have improved exponentially, LLMs may still struggle with abstract concepts, humor, complex reasoning and other tasks, which often requires carefully crafted prompts. AI models also can reflect biases present in their training data.

Prompt engineers need to understand this and address and mitigate potential biases in their final solutions. Additionally, different models may naturally interpret and respond to prompts in different ways, which poses challenges for generalization across models. Most LLM creators usually have good documentation along with prompt templates and other guidelines that work well for that model. It is always useful to familiarize yourself to efficiently use models. Finally, although inferencing speeds are continuously improving, effective prompting also presents an opportunity to program LLMs precisely at inference time to save compute and energy resources.

As AI becomes increasingly intertwined with our lives, prompt engineering is playing a crucial role in shaping how we interact with and benefit from its power. When done right, it holds immense potential to unleash possibilities that we have not imagined yet.

Deven Panchal is with AT&T Labs.