Since ChatGPT dropped in the fall of 2022, everyone and their donkey has tried their hand at prompt engineering—finding a clever way to phrase your query to a large language model (LLM) or AI art or video generator to get the best results or sidestep protections. The Internet is replete with prompt-engineering guides, cheat sheets, and advice threads to help you get the most out of an LLM.
In the commercial sector, companies are now wrangling LLMs to build product copilots, automate tedious work, create personal assistants, and more, says Austin Henley, a former Microsoft employee who conducted a series of interviews with people developing LLM-powered copilots. “Every business is trying to use it for virtually every use case that they can imagine,” Henley says.
“The only real trend may be no trend. What’s best for any given model, dataset, and prompting strategy is likely to be specific to the particular combination at hand.”
To do so, they’ve enlisted the help of prompt engineers professionally.
However, new research suggests that prompt engineering is best done by the model itself, and not by a human engineer. This has cast doubt on prompt engineering’s future—and increased suspicions that a fair portion of prompt-engineering jobs may be a passing fad, at least as the field is currently imagined.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/prompt-engineering-is-dead
