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Prompts and settings

Prompt engineering terms

How to ask AI for what you want: prompts, system prompts, few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting, plus settings like temperature and top-p. 16 terms

All terms 162 AI basics 17 Generative AI and LLMs 22 Chatbots and assistants 14 Prompts and settings 16 Images, video, audio and writing 17 Agents and automation 13 Machine learning 28 Building and running AI 14 Ethics, safety and privacy 21

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16 terms

C

Chain-of-thought prompting (CoT)Chain-of-thought prompting asks an AI to work through a problem step by step before giving its answer, which often improves accuracy on harder questions.Context engineeringContext engineering is choosing what an AI model sees for each request, such as instructions, documents, memory and tool results, so it can answer well.Custom instructionsCustom instructions are standing preferences you give a chatbot, like your job or preferred style, so it applies them to every conversation.

F

Few-shot promptingFew-shot prompting means including a few worked examples in your prompt so the AI copies the pattern, format or style you want.Frequency penaltyFrequency penalty is a setting that discourages an AI from repeating the same words, with a stronger effect the more often a word has already appeared.

M

Max tokensMax tokens is a setting that caps how long an AI’s reply can be, measured in tokens. When the limit is reached, the answer stops, even mid-sentence.

P

Presence penaltyPresence penalty is a setting that nudges an AI toward new words and topics by penalising any word that has already appeared, however many times.PromptA prompt is the instruction or question you give an AI tool, such as a message to a chatbot or a description for an image generator.Prompt chainingPrompt chaining breaks a big task into a series of smaller prompts, where each step’s answer feeds into the next.Prompt engineeringPrompt engineering is the skill of writing and refining prompts so an AI gives more accurate, useful and consistent results.Prompt templateA prompt template is a reusable prompt with blanks to fill in, so you get consistent results for a task you do often.

R

Role promptingRole prompting tells the AI to answer as a particular person or expert, such as “Act as a careers coach”, to shape its tone, focus and detail.

S

System promptA system prompt is a set of background instructions that shapes how an AI behaves in every reply, such as its role, tone and rules. Users often don’t see it.

T

TemperatureTemperature is a setting that controls how random or creative an AI’s output is. Low values give focused, predictable answers; high values, more varied ones.Top-pTop-p is a setting that limits an AI’s word choices to its most likely options, such as those making up 90% of the probability. Lower values are more focused.

Z

Zero-shot promptingZero-shot prompting means asking an AI to do a task without giving it any examples, relying only on your instructions.

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