The whole “prompt engineering “ space has a smell of secret sauce that is ultimately not IP or even particularly clever. Reading the SOTA systems prompts and other prompt optimisations leads me to believe that any business model based in prompt manipulation is ultimately offering a zero marginal value product, not a
Zero marginal cost one.
We call those "Snake Oil Mines" in the military industrial complex. They're great! Legendary examples include the Norden Bombsight, MBSE, AS9100 Consultancy[1], and Six Sigma. "Unfalsifiable results" means "you need more".
The beauty is you can make your very own snake oil based on them. All kinds of clever optimizations when no one's sure what the end result is supposed to look like.
EDIT I'm sorry if it seems like I'm picking on "AI" stuff. I'm really not. I'm picking on people buying products without enunciating what it is they're trying to do.
[1] When it's not just straight extortion, i.e., the auditor "selling" consultancy services to make sure you "pass"
I am always amazed at these highly engineered prompts where the negative space is full of terms like “grotesque”, “deformed”, “extra toes”, etc…. It feels so much like waving a dead chicken over it. A very superstitious practice.
yeah. How many images are in the training dataset labelled with "extra toes" guys? How about "malformed limbs"? Lets at least have some understanding of how these things are trained and work if we're gonna be selling services based on them.
Grotesque might conceivably have some effect. but its pretty clearly cargo culting
Yeah I get the same sense. Prompt engineering is short term need while models haven’t really been productized very well. I would certainly expect to be less of a need in the coming couple of years when LLMs are refined and targeted to specific use cases.
Basically the only reason we need prompt engineering is that current models still aren’t that good (relatively). If they were, they would be able to help themselves with the silly task of prompt engineering without all the superstition.
Comments
The whole “prompt engineering “ space has a smell of secret sauce that is ultimately not IP or even particularly clever. Reading the SOTA systems prompts and other prompt optimisations leads me to believe that any business model based in prompt manipulation is ultimately offering a zero marginal value product, not a Zero marginal cost one.
We call those "Snake Oil Mines" in the military industrial complex. They're great! Legendary examples include the Norden Bombsight, MBSE, AS9100 Consultancy[1], and Six Sigma. "Unfalsifiable results" means "you need more".
The beauty is you can make your very own snake oil based on them. All kinds of clever optimizations when no one's sure what the end result is supposed to look like.
EDIT I'm sorry if it seems like I'm picking on "AI" stuff. I'm really not. I'm picking on people buying products without enunciating what it is they're trying to do.
[1] When it's not just straight extortion, i.e., the auditor "selling" consultancy services to make sure you "pass"
I am always amazed at these highly engineered prompts where the negative space is full of terms like “grotesque”, “deformed”, “extra toes”, etc…. It feels so much like waving a dead chicken over it. A very superstitious practice.
yeah. How many images are in the training dataset labelled with "extra toes" guys? How about "malformed limbs"? Lets at least have some understanding of how these things are trained and work if we're gonna be selling services based on them.
Grotesque might conceivably have some effect. but its pretty clearly cargo culting
Yeah I get the same sense. Prompt engineering is short term need while models haven’t really been productized very well. I would certainly expect to be less of a need in the coming couple of years when LLMs are refined and targeted to specific use cases.
Basically the only reason we need prompt engineering is that current models still aren’t that good (relatively). If they were, they would be able to help themselves with the silly task of prompt engineering without all the superstition.