19/02/2024, 14:47 Best practices for prompt engineering with the OpenAI API | OpenAI Help Center

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All Collections API General FAQ Best practices for prompt engineering with the OpenAI API

Best practices for prompt engineering

with the OpenAI API
How to give clear and effective instructions to OpenAI models

Updated this week

Table of contents

How prompt engineering works

Due to the way OpenAI models are trained, there are specific prompt formats that work
particularly well and lead to more useful model outputs.

The official prompt engineering guide by OpenAI is usually the best place to start for
prompting tips.

Below we present a number of prompt formats we find work well, but feel free to explore
different formats, which may fit your task better.

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. Newer
models tend to be easier to prompt engineer.

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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

Less effective ❌ :

Extract the entities mentioned in the text below. Extract the following 4 entity types:

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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, 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.
##

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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:

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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 generally more expensive and may 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.

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