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Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning vocabulary · Prompts and Retrieval

Prompt

Meaning in artificial intelligence & machine learning, with examples

/prɑːmpt/nounCore term

In artificial intelligence & machine learning, prompt means: The text or other input given to a generative model to tell it what to do, such as a question, an instruction or a few examples followed by a task.

In Turkish: istem, prompt, komut

How it is used

Engineers write, test, tweak and version prompts, often as templates with variables. It is also a verb: to prompt a model. In Turkish teams 'prompt' is the everyday word; 'istem' appears mostly in formal texts.

Example sentences

  1. Adding two examples to the prompt fixed most of the formatting errors.

  2. We keep every prompt in version control, just like code.

Common collocations

  • write a prompt
  • prompt template
  • user prompt
  • prompt the model
  • system promptInstructions given to a chat model before the conversation starts, which set its role, rules, tone and limits for all the messages that follow.
  • prompt engineeringThe practice of designing, testing and improving prompts so that a model gives accurate, useful and consistent outputs for a task.
  • few-shot promptingGiving a model a few worked examples of a task inside the prompt, so that it can follow the same pattern for a new input without any extra training.
  • LLMShort for large language model: a very large neural network trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it answer questions, write, summarize and code.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Prompts and Retrieval

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