Talk:Chain-of-thought prompting

Merge

@Alalch E.: I understand your reasons for merging this article into prompt engineering for 'context' purposes, but I don't think this decision is fully justified. CoT prompting did not emerge as a prompt engineering technique. When CoT prompting came about, 'prompt engineering' was a relatively rare term. Instead, CoT prompting emerged in research purely as a general NLP technique and emergent ability of LLMs. Therefore, I don't believe that the context from prompt engineering is vital to the CoT prompting article because that would imply that CoT prompting doesn't make sense without knowing about prompt engineering, and that just doesn't make sense; the term 'prompt engineering' was unheard of when 'chain-of-thought prompting' was introduced. Instead, I don't see what is lacking by providing context and explanation through wikilinks and the like. I am inclined to revert for these reasons, but I'd like to hear your take on that first. PopoDameron ⁠talk 21:52, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

I think that it's an emergent field with some parallel and highly overlapping terminology, with different people / groups of people coming up with terms such as "CoT prompting" and "prompt engineering" at about the same time. Despite this, I see CoT prompting as essentially a subtopic of prompt engineering: Prompt engineering can be seen as a more general, descriptive, term that encompasses CoT prompting, as one of its essential techniques. —Alalch E. 22:07, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Sure, but the fact that different people use the terms is what will cause a problem. "CoT prompting" is used more in research and "prompt engineering" is used more outside of it. People coming from a research paper that mentions "CoT prompting" will want to learn little about "prompt engineering". I see reason to have a subsection in prompt engineering about CoT prompting, but I think it would be more apt to keep it succinct and to have it link to a main article about CoT prompting. PopoDameron ⁠talk 22:14, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm not against that, but currently, I think that all of the content about CoT prompting that is included in Prompt engineering is basically due, and not too detailed. The prompt engineering article is certainly enriched by having this information. I think it flows much more naturally when readers can learn a little more about the practicalities of engineering prompts by reading about CoT as one of the methods. So I would not look in the direction of summarizing at the currently available level of detail in our pages. Instead I would look at restoring the article from the redirect when there is more detailed content about CoT prompting, ready to be written, so that what's already in prompt engineering could serve as a summary, per WP:SUMMARYSTYLE. —Alalch E. 22:18, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

To be extra clear, I'm NOT against a separate article about CoT prompting in principle. —Alalch E. 22:20, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

You're right, I agree that the current body of the old CoT article is helpful to the prompt engineering article. I'll look into expanding the CoT article soon, then (and might end up leaving it as is for the time being if there's nothing too substantial to add right now). PopoDameron ⁠talk 22:26, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Great! I'll see if I can be of any help to that end (not guaranteed). —Alalch E. 22:28, 4 April 2023 (UTC)