Welcome to this course on ChatGPT Prom Engineering for Developers. I am thrilled to have with me Isa, who is a member of the technical staff of OpenAI and has built the popular ChatGPT retrieval plug-in. She has also contributed to the OpenAI Cookbook that teaches people prompting. I am thrilled to be here and share some prompting best practices with you.
There has been a lot of material on the internet for prompting with articles like ‘30 Prompts Everyone Has to Know’. However, most of it has been focused on the ChatGPT web user interface, which is used for specific and often one-off tasks. But the power of large language models as a developer lies in using API calls to quickly build software applications.
In this course, we will share with you the possibilities of what you can do with language models and best practices for using them. We will cover prompting best practices for software development and common use cases such as summarizing, inferring, transforming, and expanding. You will also learn how to build a chatbot using a language model.
There are broadly two types of language models: base language models (Bas LM) and instruction tuned language models (instruction tuned LM). Bas LM is trained to predict the next word based on text training data, while instruction tuned LM is trained to follow instructions. For most practical applications, we recommend using instruction tuned LM, as they are easier to use and safer.
Before we move on, I would like to acknowledge the team from OpenAI and Deep Learning who have contributed to the materials for this course. They have been involved in brainstorming and vetting the materials to put together the curriculum.
When using an instruction tuned LM, think of giving instructions to another person who is smart but doesn’t know the specifics of your task. Clear and specific instructions are important, as well as specifying the tone and style of the text you want. Giving the LM time to think is also a key principle of prompting.
In the next video, you will see examples of how to be clear and specific in your instructions. Let’s continue to the next video.
