Always be prompting
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Reporter’s note: Before we get into this, thank you to the Startups Weekly readers who pointed out that last week’s link to my column was broken. If you want to know about the state of solo GPs — which oh boy, is it rocky — please read my TC+ story here: Are Solo GPs screwed? Ok, now into this week’s newsletter!
‘AI whisperer’ jobs are roles made for people who are savvy prompt engineers and able to manipulate ChatGPT or other generative AI tools to get what they want from it. As Bloomberg reported earlier this week, these jobs can land up to $335,000 in annual salary. Cha-ching.
It’s an impressive price tag for a job role that would’ve blown minds just one year ago. It’s also a reminder that generative AI’s boom will create a whole new set of questions about how we ask questions. By just spending a few minutes playing around on ChatGPT, I learned that you can elicit a diversity of AI-generated answers to questions just by changing a few select words and demanding bullet points versus three sentences.
Before we see a whole wave of AI prompt engineering consultancy practices for hire — just kidding, we already are — I figured it would be helpful to aggregate some of the top tips I’m hearing from the community on how to better interact with AI to get it to give you the answers you want. We already know it’s imperfect, it can’t be trusted with every single fact, and it sometimes is left speechless. What can we do with what we’ve got, though?
Many techies weighed in on Twitter — you can see the full thread here — but here are the top five tips:
1. Overdescribe. As one person put it, don’t be afraid to be extra when prompting artificial intelligence. There’s a difference between asking for a banana bread recipe and asking for a simple banana bread recipe that incorporates cardamom, takes less than one hour to bake and has a surprise ingredient. Or put differently, don’t just keep it high level, get specific about the tone and complexity you prefer in answers. Over explanation and adjective use was probably the most common tip I received when asking for advice on how to be a better prompter.
2. Ask for help. It’s not always easy to know how specific to get when you’re prompting the AI — so why not ask for help? One entrepreneur told me to ask ChatGPT how to prompt it based on what I want, so ask something like, what information do you need from me to create an itinerary for a San Francisco hiking trip? The AI will tell you what it needs — I wish humans were like this — and as a result, you’ll get a more tailored answer.
3. Give feedback. Let’s say I ask for: ‘a chatty but informative three-sentence explanation about the impact of generative AI on education, incorporating at least one metaphor.’ ChatGPT had a pretty good response, but I didn’t love the response. Tell it that! Feedback is helpful to train the AI on the types of answers you like and takes a split second. Here’s how that process went for me:
4. Ask for nuance. ChatGPT only answers what it is asked, so why not ask for nuance? A founder said that they ask for pros and cons on every recommendation that they prompt ChatGPT to give.
5. Be a little cringe. Is it self-indulgent to tell AI to speak like me, specifically nudging it to be voicey, charismatic and informative? Maybe, but it helps. One of the biggest hacks I’ve learned is to throw my Twitter handle in when asking for a deep dive on a topic. ChatGPT responds better to ‘Make an argument for why Cauliflower is the best vegetable in the tone of @nmasc_’ than ‘Make an argument for why Cauliflower is the best vegetable in the tone of Natasha Mascarenhas.’ And because I know you’re curious about the former, I’ll leave you with ChatGPT’s argument on cauliflower supremacy:
Those are some starter tips I’m incorporating but I’d still love to know what else I’m missing so please do throw your top tips in this thread. Also, shout out to Fundrise CMO Jon Carden for the headline inspiration!
In the rest of this newsletter we’re talking about Cerebral Valley and Substack. As always, you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram to continue the conversation. And if you feel like supporting me extra, subscribe to my personal (and free!) Substack.
Overheard in Cerebral Valley
I attended the Cerebral Valley AI conference on Wednesday, which brought together the top 200 minds in artificial intelligence for a one day deep dive. The event, put on by Newcomer and Volley, was immersive to say the least. I spoke to half a dozen YC founders who are building AI companies, bullish and surprisingly bearish VCs, and, briefly, Stability CEO and founder Emad Mostaque, about keeping it real.
Here are some great one liners:
- ‘The pause for six months seems destructive and probably exorbitantly expensive to consider,’ said Kleiner Perkins partner Bucky Moore in response to the recent open letter.
- ‘Safety research is one of the areas were best known for … I don’t necessarily think that’s un-synonymous with a technology company, a company that is also thinking about how to take that research and turn it into something that is practical,’ said Daniela Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic.
- ‘You’re building for GPT-4, but you want to be building for GPT-10,’ said Lisha Li, CEO of Rosebud AI.
- ‘Of course we’re not in a bubble, this is bigger than 5G and self-driving customers,’ Emad Mostaque, CEO and founder of Stability AI, said about AI’s hype. ‘When founders come to me, I say build good products and solve problems … most of the stuff is still surface level.’
And finally: If you’re still looking for more Stability, listen to my podcast interview with Credo AI founder Navrina Singh, who spoke about responsible AI, governance and fear as a not-so-great motivator.
Substack’s newsy week
Blogging and media platform Substack opened up a community fundraising round this week, seeking capital from its writers, readers both accredited and unaccredited. As of Friday morning, over 6,000 investors have pledged around $6.9 million in funding.
We spoke about the crowdfunding campaign on our podcast Equity this week, too, which was spicier than I expected. To me, if Substack successfully raises money from its community after disclosing its financials — the equity crowdfunding world will get a much needed reputation and public perception boost.
Here’s what to know, via my colleague Alex Wilhelm:
- Speaking of interesting community efforts: I wrote about Seed Checks this week, which is an effort to bring a common app style model to fundraising. Founders are invited to apply using a one-minute form that asks for a deck, memo and region. The app is then blasted to 16 investors, including Conviction’s Sarah Guo, Mercury’s Immad Akhund and CapitalX’s Cindy Bi — all of whom have unilateral or individual check-writing capabilities.
- Hampton is tech’s new membership community for chief executive officers.
Etc., etc.
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US investors slash Byju’s and Swiggy valuation
Apple acquired a startup using AI to compress videos
The layoffs will continue until (investor) morale improves
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Pitch Deck Teardown: Northspyre’s $25 million Series B deck
What’s going on with the TikTok ban?
Blinded by the speed of change
Talk soon,
Reference: https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/01/how-to-prompt-ai-chat-gpt/
Ref: techcrunch
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