🤐 The LLM wants to talk

Large language model prompt and conversation examples: From talking to “thinking.”

robot using a megaphone — Bing Image Creator, DALL-E

In this post, we will unmask the mystery of talking LLMs (chat bots). This is aimed for the rest of us who need to catch up. No tech talk nor heavy words here! (well... maybe a little). We’ll use a ton of examples to cover the following:

• System Prompt
• Hallucination
• Grounding
• Context Window
• Retrieval Augmented Generation
• Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
• Reasoning and Acting (ReAct)

Let’s go!

🤖 The System Prompt

We’ll start with “hello.”

User: Hello Robert!
Tony: Hello! I'm actually Tony, not Robert. How can I assist you today?

Whoa. How did it know it’s called “Tony”? Well, there’s this thing called a system prompt. It’s a text instruction (tagged as a system prompt) we send to the LLM way before any message is sent. This sets the context for the whole back and forth conversation between you and the LLM.

Different LLMs have different ways their system prompts can be configured. The system prompt we used for above is: