If you've spent any time on LinkedIn in the last year or so, you'll likely be quite familiar with a certain genre of post generally along the lines of "this new model changes *everything*. Everything you thought you knew about AI before this was wrong!" These have, of course, been a thing since at least 2022, and they belie a lack of understanding about what it is that makes these models less useful than they promise to be. The posts largely ignore the fact that much of the behaviour of interest to us is dependent not on the model, but on how the model is constrained, and that furthermore technology for constraining LLMs is not very good. Specifically, we have precisely one method of doing it: the prompt.

If you've spent any time on LinkedIn in the last year or so, you'll likely be quite familiar with a certain genre of post generally along the lines of "this new model changes everything. Everything you thought you knew about AI before this was wrong!" These have, of course, been a thing since at least 2022, and they belie a lack of understanding about what it is that makes these models less useful than they promise to be. The posts largely ignore the fact that much of the behaviour of interest to us is dependent not on the model, but on how the model is constrained, and that furthermore technology for constraining LLMs is not very good. Specifically, we have precisely one method of doing it: the prompt.