Andrew Ng Course – ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers | Hacker News Reader

Andrew Ng Course – ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers

deeplearning.ai

87 pointschirau20 comments

Imagine a course called "Google Prompt Engineering". If nothing else, the word "engineering" feels like a huge stretch. Fwiw also not a big fan of the "Software Engineer" title as it's commonly applied.

Prompt engineering seems a little like an attempt to make it seem like this will be “a future profession” you could develop.

Seems more likely to me that NLP advances will just make the whole idea obsolete quite quickly ?

I too don't like to use the title Engineer lightly, but what would be a good title for someone who's job is building and maintaining chains of prompts that perform X,Y,Z in a system? Developer? The comparison with search engines is naive since those are made for end users and LLMs are a piece of software that are a part of a bigger solution.

Search engines can be used by anything, not just end users. And ChatGPT can be used by end users. So I don't see that much of a difference.

If I build and maintain chains of Google's APIs calls to develop an application that performs X, Y, and Z then I would say that I'm an "application developer", not a "Google API engineer". I mean I assume there is going to more to the application than just a pile of API calls.

So maybe a good name for this course would be "Building applications using Large Language Models", which is actually how the course is described in the intro.

Application developers output applications, but somehow "essay developer" or "email developer" doesn't have the right feel to it. Maybe "GPT-assisted copywriter"? or for a more specalizied role, "GPT-assisted training developer"?

Or maybe it's just a modern expected skill, and those who choose not to incorporate it in their workflow are left to struggle to keep up, just like if someone refused to use Google in 2001. After all, it's not like I list Google-fu in the skills section of my resume, despite that being a skill I use every day and find indispensable.

> Or maybe it's just a modern expected skill

Yeah I agree with this. The tool is not the product or profession.

In the course they use Python notebooks to make a chatbot that uses openAI's api. It's not just "how to make good prompts" (although they do have that in the first 5 mins or so).

I think we agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35741552

In fifty years, there will be a Ng’s School of Magic and Useful Incantations.

How all that stuff works will have been forgotten by the human race.

I see it as the same engineering used in “social engineering”.

Which is to say, it's the original hack and possibly the most important branch? Not sure I agree with that, but it's not my claim.

Yeah if anything, your a Wizard.

It has a very low information content; it demonstrates translation, summarization, sentiment analysis. The most interest bit is at the end where they make a pizza-order-taking-chatbot.

You are OrderBot, an automated service to collect orders for a pizza restaurant. You first greet the customer, then collects the order, and then asks if it's a pickup or delivery. You wait to collect the entire order, then summarize it and check for a final time if the customer wants to add anything else. If it's a delivery, you ask for an address. Finally you collect the payment. Make sure to clarify all options, extras and sizes to uniquely identify the item from the menu. You respond in a short, very conversational friendly style.

The menu includes pepperoni pizza 12.95, 10.00, 7.00 cheese pizza 10.95, 9.25, 6.50 eggplant pizza 11.95, 9.75, 6.75 fries 4.50, 3.50 greek salad 7.25 Toppings: extra cheese 2.00, mushrooms 1.50 sausage 3.00 canadian bacon 3.50 AI sauce 1.50 peppers 1.00 Drinks: coke 3.00, 2.00, 1.00 sprite 3.00, 2.00, 1.00 bottled water 5.00

So it’s a one hour thing? Just put it on yt, why all the fuss with the website etc??

To hook people up on email marketing campaign

It's his learning platform. It's hardly surprising.

It's not just a set of videos. There are also Jupyter notebooks to follow along and try out your own code and prompts.

Do the prompts become obsolete with new versions of ChatGPT?

Would love to see examples of these "powerful applications" built in "minutes or hours" by "AI engineers".

While it seems interesting it the videos aren't loading for me due to CORS issues.

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