Long live AI prompt engineering
... Battle and Gollapudi decided to systematically test how different prompt engineering strategies impact an LLM’s ability to solve grade school math questions. They tested three different open source language models with 60 different prompt combinations each. What they found was a surprising lack of consistency. Even chain-of-thought prompting sometimes helped and other times hurt performance. “The only real trend may be no trend,” they write....
There is an alternative to the trial-and-error style prompt engineering that yielded such inconsistent results: Ask the language model to devise its own optimal prompt. ...
Battle says that optimizing the prompts algorithmically fundamentally makes sense given what language models really are—models. ...
Image generation algorithms can benefit from automatically generated prompts as well. ...
See the full story here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/prompt-engineering-is-dead