0% found this document useful (0 votes)

193 views

Best Practices For Prompt Engineering With OpenAI API - OpenAI Help Center

The document provides best practices for prompt engineering with OpenAI API models. It discusses using specific, descriptive instructions; showing desired output formats through examples; starting with zero-shot then few-shot examples before fine-tuning; and reducing imprecise language. It also covers parameters like model, temperature and max_tokens.

Uploaded by

Ricardo Pietrobon

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

0% found this document useful (0 votes)

193 views

Best Practices For Prompt Engineering With OpenAI API - OpenAI Help Center

Uploaded by

Ricardo Pietrobon

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

You are on page 1/ 7

Search for articles...

All Collections OpenAI API Prompt engineering

Best practices for prompt engineering with OpenAI API

Best practices for prompt engineering

with OpenAI API
How to give clear and effective instructions to GPT-3 and Codex
J Written by Jessica Shieh
Updated over a week ago
Table of contents

💡 If you're just getting started with OpenAI API, we recommend reading the Introduction
and Quickstart tutorials first.

How prompt engineering works

Due to the way the instruction-following models are trained or the data they are trained on, there
are specific prompt formats that work particularly well and align better with the tasks at hand.
Below we present a number of prompt formats we find work reliably well, but feel free to explore
different formats, which may fit your task best.

Rules of Thumb and Examples

Note: the "{text input here}" is a placeholder for actual text/context
1. Use the latest model
For best results, we generally recommend using the latest, most capable models. As of
November 2022, the best options are the “text-davinci-003” model for text generation, and
the “code-davinci-002” model for code generation.

2. Put instructions at the beginning of the prompt and use ### or """ to
separate the instruction and context
Less effective ❌ :
Summarize the text below as a bullet point list of the most important points.

{text input here}

Better ✅ :
Summarize the text below as a bullet point list of the most important points.

Text: """
{text input here}
"""

3. Be specific, descriptive and as detailed as possible about the desired

context, outcome, length, format, style, etc
Be specific about the context, outcome, length, format, style, etc
Less effective ❌ :
Write a poem about OpenAI.

Better ✅ :
Write a short inspiring poem about OpenAI, focusing on the recent DALL-E product launch
4. Articulate the desired output format through examples (example 1,
example 2).
Less effective ❌ :
Extract the entities mentioned in the text below. Extract the following 4 entity types:

Text: {text}

Show, and tell - the models respond better when shown specific format requirements. This also
makes it easier to programmatically parse out multiple outputs reliably.
Better ✅ :
Extract the important entities mentioned in the text below. First extract all company na

Desired format:
Company names: <comma_separated_list_of_company_names>
People names: -||-
Specific topics: -||-
General themes: -||-

Text: {text}

5. Start with zero-shot, then few-shot (example), neither of them worked,

then fine-tune
✅ Zero-shot
Extract keywords from the below text.

Text: {text}

Keywords:

✅ Few-shot - provide a couple of examples

Extract keywords from the corresponding texts below.

Text 1: Stripe provides APIs that web developers can use to integrate payment processing
Keywords 1: Stripe, payment processing, APIs, web developers, websites, mobile applicati
##
Text 2: OpenAI has trained cutting-edge language models that are very good at understand
Keywords 2: OpenAI, language models, text processing, API.
##
Text 3: {text}
Keywords 3:

✅ Fine-tune: see fine-tune best practices here.

6. Reduce “fluffy” and imprecise descriptions

Less effective ❌ :
The description for this product should be fairly short, a few sentences only, and not t

Better ✅ :
Use a 3 to 5 sentence paragraph to describe this product.

7. Instead of just saying what not to do, say what to do instead

Less effective ❌ :
The following is a conversation between an Agent and a Customer. DO NOT ASK USERNAME OR

Customer: I can’t log in to my account.

Agent:

Better ✅ :
The following is a conversation between an Agent and a Customer. The agent will attempt

Customer: I can’t log in to my account.

Agent:

8. Code Generation Specific - Use “leading words” to nudge the model

toward a particular pattern
Less effective ❌ :
# Write a simple python function that
# 1. Ask me for a number in mile
# 2. It converts miles to kilometers

In this code example below, adding “import” hints to the model that it should start writing in
Python. (Similarly “SELECT” is a good hint for the start of a SQL statement.)
Better ✅ :
# Write a simple python function that
# 1. Ask me for a number in mile
# 2. It converts miles to kilometers

import

Parameters
Generally, we find that model and temperature are the most commonly used parameters to alter
the model output.
1. model - Higher performance models are more expensive and have higher latency.
2. temperature - A measure of how often the model outputs a less likely token. The higher the
temperature, the more random (and usually creative) the output. This, however, is not the
same as “truthfulness”. For most factual use cases such as data extraction, and truthful
Q&A, the temperature of 0 is best.
3. max_tokens (maximum length) - Does not control the length of the output, but a hard cutoff
limit for token generation. Ideally you won’t hit this limit often, as your model will stop either
when it thinks it’s finished, or when it hits a stop sequence you defined.
4. stop (stop sequences) - A set of characters (tokens) that, when generated, will cause the
text generation to stop.
For other parameter descriptions see the API reference.

Additional Resources
If you're interested in additional resources, we recommend:
Guides
Text completion - learn how to generate or edit text using our models
Code completion - explore prompt engineering for Codex
Fine-tuning - Learn how to train a custom model for your use case
Embeddings - learn how to search, classify, and compare text
Moderation
OpenAI cookbook repo - contains example code and prompts for accomplishing common
tasks with the API, including Question-answering with Embeddings
Community Forum