A prompt in generative AI models is the textual input provided by users to guide the model's output. This could range from simple questions to detailed descriptions or specific tasks. In the context of image generation models like DALLE-3, prompts are often descriptive, while in LLMs like GPT-4 or Gemini, they can vary from simple queries to complex problem statements. Prompts generally consist of instructions, questions, input data, and examples. In practice, to elicit a desired response from an AI model, a prompt must contain either instructions or questions, with other elements being optional. Basic prompts in LLMs can be as simple as asking a direct question or providing instructions for a specific task. Advanced prompts involve more complex structures, such as "chain of thought" prompting, where the model is guided to follow a logical reasoning process to arrive at an answer.

You tell the model what to do through a textual interface, and the model tries to accomplish the task. What you tell the model to do in a broad sense is the prompt. In the case of image generation AI models such as DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion, the prompt is mainly a description of the image you want to generate. In the case of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 or ChatGPT the prompt can contain anything from a simple question ("Who is the president of the US?") to a complicated problem with all kinds of data inserted in the prompt (note that you can even input a CSV file with raw data as part of the input). It can also be a vague statement such as "Tell me a joke. Even more generally, in generative task oriented models such as Gato, the prompt can be extremely high level and define a task you need help with ("I need to organize a one week trip to Greece"). For the rest of this document, and for now, we will focus on the specific use case of prompts for LLMs. In order to obtain a result, either 1 or 2 must be present. Let's see a few examples (all of them using ChatGPT). Beyond asking a simple question, possibly the next level of sophistication in a prompt is to include some instructions on how the model should answer the question. Here I ask for advice on how to write a college essay, but also include instructions on the different aspects I am interested to hear about in the answer. "How should I write my college admission essay?

George Orwell's novel "1984" is hitting the bestseller lists again, having been moved in bookstores from the "dystopian science fiction" shelves to the "current affairs" section. But today let's talk about another iteration of "1984": Ridley Scott's television commercial that year for the then-new Apple Macintosh. As we reported in 2014, on its 30th anniversary, the "1984" ad aired on national television in its full 60-second form only once, during Super Bowl XVIII on Jan. 22, 1984. It became a legend almost immediately. More to the point, it established Super Bowl TV commercials as a thing, garnering almost as much PR attention as the game itself.