Prompting as Scientific Inquiry

Understand

Prompting is the primary method by which we study and control large language models.

• It is also one of the most powerful: nearly every major capability attributed to LLMs-few-shot learning, chain-of-thought, constitutional AI-was first unlocked through prompting.
• Yet prompting is rarely treated as science and is frequently frowned upon as alchemy.
• We argue that this is a category error.