Riley Goodside: The Art and Craft of Prompt Engineering

Riley Goodside: The Art and Craft of Prompt Engineering

Author: Daniel Bashir June 1, 2023 Duration: 59:42

In episode 75 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Riley Goodside.

Riley is a Staff Prompt Engineer at Scale AI. Riley began posting GPT-3 prompt examples and screenshot demonstrations in 2022. He previously worked as a data scientist at OkCupid, Grindr, and CopyAI.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (01:37) Riley’s journey to becoming the first Staff Prompt Enginer

* (02:00) data science background in online dating industry

* (02:15) Sabbatical + catching up on LLM progress

* (04:00) AI Dungeon and first taste of GPT-3

* (05:10) Developing on codex, ideas about integrating codex with Jupyter Notebooks, start of posting on Twitter

* (08:30) “LLM ethnography”

* (09:12) The history of prompt engineering: in-context learning, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)

* (10:20) Models used to be harder to talk to

* (10:45) The three eras

* (10:45) 1 - Pre-trained LM era—simple next-word predictors

* (12:54) 2 - Instruction tuning

* (16:13) 3 - RLHF and overcoming instruction tuning’s limitations

* (19:24) Prompting as subtractive sculpting, prompting and AI safety

* (21:17) Riley on RLHF and safety

* (24:55) Riley’s most interesting experiments and observations

* (25:50) Mode collapse in RLHF models

* (29:24) Prompting models with very long instructions

* (33:13) Explorations with regular expressions, chain-of-thought prompting styles

* (36:32) Theories of in-context learning and prompting, why certain prompts work well

* (42:20) Riley’s advice for writing better prompts

* (49:02) Debates over prompt engineering as a career, relevance of prompt engineers

* (58:55) Outro

Links:

* Riley’s Twitter and LinkedIn

* Talk: LLM Prompt Engineering and RLHF: History and Techniques



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Hosted by Daniel Bashir, The Gradient: Perspectives on AI moves beyond surface-level headlines to explore the intricate machinery and human ideas shaping artificial intelligence. Each episode is built on a foundation of deep research, leading to conversations that are both technically substantive and broadly accessible. You'll hear from researchers, engineers, and philosophers who are actively building and critiquing our technological future, discussing not just how AI systems work, but the larger implications of their integration into society. This isn't about speculative hype; it's a grounded examination of real progress, persistent challenges, and ethical considerations from those on the front lines. The discussions peel back layers on topics like model architecture, policy, and the fundamental science behind the algorithms becoming part of our daily lives. For anyone curious about the substance behind the buzz-whether you have a technical background or are simply keen to understand a defining technology of our age-this podcast offers a crucial and thoughtful resource. Tune in for a consistently detailed and nuanced take that treats artificial intelligence with the complexity it deserves.
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The Gradient: Perspectives on AI
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