Discover some valuable insights we have gathered over time and are excited to share with you. Dive in to discover how to craft clear, effective prompts and avoid common pitfalls, ensuring you get the best possible responses every time.
State the behavior you want the model to follow. Keep explicit negative constraints for hard boundaries, such as content the model must never reveal.Prompt with negation: Don't talk about any other baseball team besides the New York Yankees.Prompt without negation: Only talk about the New York Yankees.
LLMs are probabilistic algorithms that generate the next token based on previous input. As we covered in our Basics of AI models guide, this probabilistic approach means they can sometimes generate responses that aren’t factually accurate, even when they sound convincing. This is called hallucination.We recommend always verifying generated responses. The most effective way to catch hallucinations when working with your data is to ask for direct quotes. This forces the model to provide specific excerpts rather than generating plausible-sounding but potentially inaccurate information.
We discussed context window lengths earlier, but there’s another important constraint: response limits.The limit per response is the maximum number of tokens a model can generate in one response. The limit varies by model.Here’s the thing: you can work around this! When you hit the limit, just prompt the model to continue:
Continue
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And then?
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Pro tip: Instead of pushing for very long responses, break your content into chunks. Ask for “Part 1: Introduction and Problem Definition” in one prompt, then “Part 2: Solution Analysis” in the next. You’ll get better, more focused content without the repetition risk that comes with extended generation.
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Responses are generated using AI and may contain mistakes.