Prompt engineering

How it is used

It includes writing clear instructions, adding examples, setting an output format and testing prompts against an evaluation set. Some people find the name too grand, so 'prompt design' and 'context engineering' are also used.

Example sentences

1. A week of prompt engineering gave us most of the gains we had expected from fine-tuning.

2. Good prompt engineering starts with a test set, not with clever wording.

Common collocations

• prompt engineering techniques
• do prompt engineering
• prompt engineer
• prompt design

Related terms

• promptThe 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.
• 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.
• chain of thoughtStep-by-step reasoning that a model writes out before giving its final answer, which often improves results on math, logic and multi-step problems.
• 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.

This word in other fields

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

• prompt engineering · Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

More terms: Machine Learning and Data Processing

• artificial intelligence
• machine learning
• model
• dataset
• training data
• label
• train
• supervised learning
• neural network
• deep learning
• loss function
• overfitting