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Research & Insights

How to Unlock Advanced Reasoning in LLMs

Chain-of-thought prompting encourages the LLM to break down its reasoning into a step-by-step process before providing a final answer. This has several key benefits:

  • Improved accuracy on complex reasoning tasks
  • Greater transparency into the model's thought process
  • Reduced hallucination by grounding the output in a logical sequence

While simply adding "Let's think step by step" to your prompts can help, there are more advanced techniques to make CoT even more effective. Here are three key strategies.

How to Increase Diversity while Maintaining Accuracy in LLM Outputs

When working with large language models (LLMs), it's common to want varied and diverse outputs, rather than the model repeatedly generating similar responses. The go-to solution is often to increase the temperature parameter, which makes outputs more random by flattening the probability distribution. However, simply increasing temperature can lead to incoherent or low quality outputs.

Fortunately, there are several alternative techniques we can use to generate a wider variety of outputs while still maintaining coherence and quality. In this post, we'll explore 5 practical strategies you can implement today to get more diverse results from your LLMs.

The Role of Examples in Prompt Engineering

In the world of large language models (LLMs), examples play a pivotal role in shaping model behavior. Through a technique called "n-shot prompting", providing a set of well-crafted examples in the input prompt can dramatically improve the model's ability to understand the desired task and generate relevant outputs.

However, not all examples are created equal. Poorly chosen examples can lead to subpar results, wasted resources, and frustration for both developers and end-users. On the other hand, a thoughtfully curated set of examples can unlock the true potential of LLMs, enabling them to tackle complex tasks with ease.

The Power of Small, Focused Prompts

As adoption of large language models (LLMs) grows, it's tempting to create highly complex prompts to handle a variety of tasks. After all, if an LLM can engage in open-ended dialogue, surely it can tackle any request we throw at it, right?

Not so fast. My experience building dozens of LLM-powered applications has revealed an important insight: Smaller, single-purpose prompts consistently outperform large, complex ones. Let's dive into why this approach is so effective.