New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
24 by wg0 | 15 comments on Hacker News.
Is prompt engineering a snake oil? The engineering, as the word stands so far in history is about observing clear limitations and capabilities of something and then "engineering" things around it such as "engineering a compiler" is all about knowing the underlying processor, memory and other characteristics and then engineering a solution that converts a text notation to a stream of instructions that try to strike a balanced tradeoff. But with LLMs, no one knows their workings once they are trained. The other day, Bark model[0] for text to speech, the team itself has following to say on details: > Below is a list of some known non-speech sounds, but we are finding more every day. Please let us know if you find patterns that work particularly well on Discord! [laughter], [laughs], [sighs].... So that's the team themselves not knowing what their model is capable of then how come prompt engineering is any engineering at all? [0] https://ift.tt/jck2J9G