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I’m curious which one you are, so just simply respond to this email with the appropriate word!
So, do you know the difference between a Centaur and a Cyborg?
A Centaur is human from the torso up, and animal from below. Whether a horse, pegasus or unicorn, idk.
A Cyborg on another hand is a mixture of human and machine parts, but there is no clear line (or plane for those who wanna argue with me) on where the human ends and the machine begins.
It’s more of a mix here and there. It might be clear to see which part is machine, but it’s all over the place.
A ChatGPT conversation can be just like that. Some people spend long minutes on phrasing a prompt the perfect way, writing these so called “megaprompts” that have all 6 key elements and even a few more.
Then they send the prompt, and get a machine response.
Here, it’s clear where the line is.
Prompt written by human, response written by machine.
Like a centaur.
Usually one prompt gets the job done.
If you were to look at a text-only ChatGPT conversation that didn’t have “user” and “assistant” labeled, you’d still be able to tell where the border is.
Another approach is to just talk to ChatGPT like engaging in a conversation with another human being. You ask questions, then it answers. Then you ask it to ask a question (maybe for more context from you), then you answer those questions.
And it’s a really organic conversation like method.
This is the cyborg approach where the barrier between human and machine is a lot more subtle.
If you were to read through an unlabeled transcript of such a conversation, it might not be so easy to determine which part is said by whom.
Now before you get into the “ugh, I’m a centaur and I can’t prompt like a cyborg” or the “why can’t I write these great megaprompts”, let me tell you something.
Both approaches are great, and both should be used at certain times.
When to be a centaur:
- When writing Instructions for a custom GPT - you only have one Instruction prompt there to configure it for thousands of others to use.
- When writing prompts within automation flows - most of the time, you will have one GPT prompt processing information within an automation that runs thousands of times in a scalable way. No room for error there.
- When configuring Assistant APIs - this is the API version of a Custom GPT, so just like above, you have one Instruction prompt there.
In these cases, knowing all the 6 key elements of a prompt, when to use them, how to use them, when not to use them is crucial to optimize the performance of Custom GPTs and GPT-based bots alike.
When to be a cyborg:
- When you are doing research or exploration - in ChatGPT, you might need to guide a conversation in different directions before you get to where you want.
- When you don’t know what output you want - I found myself not knowing what I want more often than I like to admit. But with ChatGPT, I can just ramble on and we’ll eventually get somewhere.
- When you are testing the capabilites of GPT-4 (or any other LLM) - don’t even try to make an automation without knowing that GPT-4 (or 3.5) can do it. And it’s a lot faster to test within ChatGPT, than building and running an automation.
- When building a team of agents that should communicate with each other - when creating AI automations, you might want to use different GPT completions or Assistants that talk to one another. How you steer that conversation is also a cyborg skill.
If you want to be a cyborg, you should know the 8 different conversation design methods that we invented and refined. With them, you can design any kind of conversation within ChatGPT or in between AI agents.
And lucky for you, we have an entirely self-paced online course for this called simply the Prompt Engineering Course, where I’ll teach you all of this, and everything else you need to know in an easy to understand way with practical examples and exercises!
The Prompt Engineering course also comes with lifetime access to our exclusive community of over a thousand other lifetime members, unlimited DM support and of course, a 2024 update coming very soon!
Click here to learn more to join today, and don’t forget that the price is increasing soon (on April 30th), so if you pre-order this new course now, you’ll get $100 off!
I hope you sign up today, I’d hate for you to miss this!
Best,
Dave
