Rough Notes on Market Structure of Prompt Engineering

Attention conservation notice: incredibly rough scratchpad of ideas

Prompt engineering can be loosely thought of as providing context that shapes the interface between a model and a task.

Prompt engineering may be a transient phenomenon, similar to “advanced/cyborg/centaur” chess.

A market structure for improvements to the interface between models and the world is still generically valuable, even if human-crafted prompts disappear.

Open questions:

  • How to compose prompts? Are there useful meta-prompts? How stable are prompts across models? What does that correlate with?
  • What market structures are expressive enough? Can be understood? Can be incentive compatible?
Started on October 23, 2022