prompt engineering

6 statements across 5 episodes · 2 bullish · 1 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Oct 19, 2022 by Benedict Evans · across every show →

Everything said about prompt engineering, oldest first

Oct 19, 2022
Insight
Evans: Generative AI tackles things easy to imagine but hard to describe
“Generically what machine learning did was it let you solve problems that are hard for people to explain, but easy for people to do. The problem with these generative networks is of course, this is prompt engineering is it's easy for you to imagine, but very ha…”
Benedict Evans Oct 19, 2022 ▶ 11:26 Wondering about generative AI
Jan 30, 2023 neutral
Insight
Brown: Learning prompt engineering mirrors learning to search on Google
“Just how we had to learn how to search on Google and find the best results and what are the best questions to ask to get the best results. Now you're seeing people learn, okay, what does a proper prompt look like? What does a really good prompt look like?”
Toni Cowan-Brown Jan 30, 2023 ▶ 7:23 Generative AI
Jan 30, 2023 positive
Insight
Evans: Prompt engineering acts as a logical programming language
“Well, it's a programming language. You are feeding the statistical engine logical steps. You are saying double plus this, minus that, Conclude this, de-emphasize that, emphasize this, and you've ended up with a whole paragraph of instructions, which is actuall…”
Benedict Evans Jan 30, 2023 ▶ 22:56 Generative AI
Apr 2, 2023 positive
Insight
Cairn-Brown: Prompt engineering creativity determines generative AI output quality
“We're all being given the same tools, but you're, that creativity behind the prompt engineering is what's going to make the absolute difference here, which is fascinating.”
Toni Cairn-Brown Apr 2, 2023 ▶ 10:16 AI, copyright and collective knowledge
Aug 17, 2023 neutral
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Evans: Prompt interfaces will be abstracted away inside software tooling
“It seems to me incredibly obvious that what's going to happen is that this stuff will get abstracted inside and away. And then the actual technology of it may be running a prompt that gets inserted into an LLM, but the user will probably very often won't see t…”
Benedict Evans Aug 17, 2023 ▶ 16:15 Unbundling ChatGPT
Jul 24, 2026 negative
Opinion
Evans: Claims that prompt engineering is obsolete are 'bullshit'
“People say prompt engineering is gone. Bullshit. Like, the underlying challenge is, how do I work out how I would tell the model how I want to do this? And that's not, it's not like you have to say clever things to understand. Get the model to work in a differ…”
Benedict Evans Jul 24, 2026 ▶ 16:55 Most people and companies aren't tool-builders
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