The Limitations of Zero-Shot Prompting
In a fascinating presentation at DevDay during the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit, Dr. Andrew Ng, founder and CEO of DeepLearning.ai and LandingAI, shared his insights on the potential of AI agentic workflows to revolutionize the field of artificial intelligence. Dr. Ng argued that these iterative, multistep approaches could lead to even greater advancements than the development of more powerful foundational language models.
Traditional language models, like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in zero-shot prompting, where the model generates an output based on a single prompt without any revision. However, this approach is akin to asking a person to write an essay from start to finish without allowing them to backspace or make any edits. Despite the impressive results, there are limitations to this method.