Natural language
Natural language is the everyday language of people, in speech, writing or sign. Words alone carry only part of the meaning, because they leave out what others already understand. Context supplies the rest. It includes the circumstances, knowledge shared by those involved, and definitions taken as given. Because of that, a sentence allows more than one interpretation, and context decides which is meant. A formal language, such as a programming language, is built to remove that ambiguity, so its rules give each statement a single meaning. Natural language leaves the interpretation to context, which stays with people, so a machine reading it gets only the words. An instruction given to an AI chat therefore arrives half-stated, and AI supplies the rest by its own reading, a weak way to direct a machine.
Attention Is All You Need – why transformers changed artificial intelligence
It was transformers that solved a problem which had held back natural language processing systems for more than two decades. Classic neural networks did well on tasks where all the data was available at once — image analysis, for example. Language…
What is a prompt engineer, really?
…jobs, checking AI's answers falls to the people who use AI, so .8 AI now handles plain language so well that prompt engineering may seem unnecessary. Plain language is enough to set a task. Programming needs a precise specification, and plain language leaves too much…
To control AI, you have to program it
…to expect, which is, in effect, programming. . Their requests are also written in plain language, which tolerates ambiguity, while a program has to mean exactly one thing.6 Controlling AI through plain-language requests therefore adds a difficulty of its own: an…