What a Prompt Is
Part of the Prompt Engineering course
You have probably typed into a chat box before: asked a question, gotten an answer, maybe been surprised by how good or how wrong it was. This course teaches you to get reliably good answers on purpose, but first you need the handful of words everyone in this field uses to talk about what just happened. This lesson is that vocabulary.
A large language model (often shortened to LLM, or just called "the model") is a program that takes in text and writes back text. That is the entire interface: a text box where you type, and an area where a reply appears. Nothing about how it works on the inside is visible to you, and for this lesson, nothing about the inside matters yet. ...
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Start this lessonWhat a Prompt IsWhat you'll learn
- What a prompt is
- What a large language model is, from the outside
- The completion, and why the same prompt can answer differently
- The conversation: system, user and assistant turns
- Why a prompt is instructions rather than a search query
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All lessons in this course
11 lessons- 1What a Prompt Is20 min
- 2How Large Language Models Generate Text30 min
- 3The Five Principles of Prompting30 min
- 4Standard Practices for Text Generation35 min
- 5Prompt Templates and Function Calling35 min
- 6Vector Databases and Retrieval-Augmented Generation40 min
- 7Autonomous Agents: Memory and Tools40 min
- 8How Diffusion Models Generate Images30 min
- 9Standard Practices for Image Generation35 min
- 10Advanced Image Techniques: Inpainting, Outpainting, and ControlNet35 min
- 11Building AI-Powered Applications40 min
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