Prompt engineering

Prompts are the instructions and examples we provide to language models to steer their behavior. They are important for steering the behavior of LLMs because they allow you to align the model outputs to human intentions without expensive retraining. Carefully engineered prompts can make LLMs suitable for a wide variety of tasks beyond what they were originally trained for. Prompts act as instructions that demonstrate to the LLM what the desired input-output mapping is.

Prompts consist of three main components:

• Instructions that describe the task requirements, goals, and format of input/output. They explain the task to the model unambiguously.
• Examples that demonstrate the desired input-output pairs. They provide diverse demonstrations of how different inputs should map to outputs.
• Input that the model must act on to generate the output.

The following figure shows a few examples of prompting different language models (source: Pre...