Prompting
topic on 7 shows · 21 statements across 19 episodes
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 
Latent Space 
Lenny's Podcast 
No Priors 
the MAD Podcast 
the a16z Podcast 
20VC
21 statements about Prompting, every show
Tan: AI image and video generation requires dark-art prompt curation
“Once you're in the land of doing image gen and video gen, there's just a lot you have to do around curation and proper prompting. It's kind of like a dark art, actually, so being able to start off with the thousand examples that you've already pulled together,…”
Sanseviero: Most Conversational Model Behavior Changes Can Be Done via Prompting
“Just changing how the model behaves, you can do most, most of that via prompting nowadays, and in terms of capabilities, the models are very good out of the box.”
Deng: Goodfire's first steering API trailed prompting and fine-tuning
“When it comes to like control and design of models, you know, we tried steering with our first API and realized that it still fell short of black box techniques like prompting or fine tuning.”
Current AI products are difficult to use because they require manual prompting
“They're actually like really hard to use because you have to like be very thoughtful about when it could help you. And if you're not prompting a model to help you, it's probably not helping you at that time. And if you think of how many times like the average …”
Zhang: AI systems will learn from human examples rather than prompting
“I think there'll be more of a learning from examples that will happen. Cause if you just think about how humans learn, if you bring like a really good human support agent, they learn by shadowing and kind of seeing examples and so on. There's probably going to…”
Osika: Hyper-personalization will eliminate detailed AI prompting within five years
“Yes, I think so, but maybe it will evolve in terms of how you do it. It will, like, hyper-personalization takes care of a lot of detailed prompting. That we have to do today.”
Flanagan: Ask AI to write its own prompts for better results
“The number one tip I can just give anyone to get better at prompting is to ask the AI to create the prompt.”
Sinofsky: Prompting AI is simply programming in natural language
“You dig in, and you find out like, wow, you're prompting, Although it's English-like, it turns out you're just programming. And you're just programming in prompts.”
Rauch: There is a positive correlation between prompting and success
“I do believe that in life there is a positive correlation between prompting and success.”
Rauch: Prompting AI is the best proxy for measuring candidate curiosity
“I think prompting is the biggest proxy for how would I measure someone's curiosity.”
Schulhoff: Hands-on trial and error beats courses for learning prompting
“So my best advice on how to improve your prompting skills is actually just trial and error. You will learn the most from just Trying and interacting with chatbots and talking to them than anything else, including, you know, reading resources, taking courses, a…”
Schulhoff: Prompts formatted like common training data perform best
“It actually comes empirically from studies that have shown that formats of questions that show up most commonly in the training data are the best formats of questions to actually use when you're prompting it.”
Prompting AI agents will soon become synonymous with management
“As agents are rolled out, you'll actually start to see you know, people that are really good at prompting, really good at defining a process, be the best managers, and actually be the best at extending whatever their agenda is in the organization, or making th…”
Hershey: Prompt engineering cannot fix Claude's visual comprehension limitations
“Vision is, like, pretty beyond fixing with a prompt. Again, go for it. Have fun. I've spent a lot of hours, like, overlaying grids, overlaying images, stretching, compressing, contrast colors, all sorts of stuff.”
Biilmann: Starting new software projects is shifting from design templates to AI prompting
“There's no doubt that the way people start projects in general are really already starting to shift a lot, both from traditional templates and bootstraps and front end frameworks on the one end, on the other end from like design prototypes and visual design on…”
Field: Prompting alone represents the Telnet era of AI
“I think, like, prompting alone is sort of like we're in the telnet days of AI.”
Osika: Prompting Remains the Right Default UI for AI
“I think yes. Prompting can, you can do almost anything with prompting and explaining your thoughts in written form.”
Natural Language Prompts Can Never Completely Specify Complex Software Systems
“Prompts are great, but it's not actually a complete specification for anything. It never can be.”
Friedman: Breaking coding tasks into smaller blocks reduces prompt sensitivity
“When you take a big block, a big problem, you need a very different prompt for each one of the models to actually work. But when you take a, like a big problem and break it into small tasks, we can talk how we do that. Then the prompt matters less.”
David Luan: Iterative prompting is a flawed interface for AI
“You know, when you go work with a coworker, right, you don't just you don't just talk back and forth. You, like, actually, like, share the same canvas. You'll go use a whiteboard. You'll go, like, maybe look at the same thing on the computer together, and then…”
Guu: LLM Providers Will Maximize Prompting Capabilities to Ensure Ease of Use
“So I think there's a strong incentive to make that happen. So the folks who are providing large language models, they want to make their approaches as easy to use as a possible. And so anything that can go into prompting, it seems to me that people will try to…”