Noah Luttinger (NLW)

Today on the AI Daily Brief, how to make your LLM not average.

The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

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All right, so today's episode is something I've been thinking about for a while.

In my head, I've always called it AI's tyranny of the average.

And the simple notion here is that because AI has been trained across the entire corpus of everything that humans have output, almost by definition, it is optimized around average conventional wisdom.

Sometimes that's fine.

What that does is that it ensures that the output of an LLM has a fairly high floor.

If it produces passable content, passable writing, passable imagery, based on how you prompted it, that's good, right?

At least it gets you in the zone.

The problem is that increasingly, when it comes to production use cases and using AI for things that really matters, average isn't good enough.

We want more than average.

We want unique.

We want distinct.

We want really high quality.

And for this, we have to turn to some prompting strategies, five of which I'm going to share today, that I have found help me in the ways that I use LLMs to make them excel ahead of that average output.

Now, one of the reasons that I thought this would be a good fit for the Weekend Big Thinks slash Long Reads episode is that technology writer Alex Kantrowitz actually dropped a little quick essay on his blog, BigTechnology.com, this week that's pretty much about this.