Transcription
Hey guys, my name is Ben, and in this video, I'm going to show you how to get started with AI. In simple terms, we'll cover the true power of AI, getting started in chat GPT, and at the end of the video, we'll explore some of the more advanced features. And don't worry, even if you're a complete beginner, you'll still be able to follow along this guide. So let's get started.
AI is already capable of talking like a human, generating beautiful works of art, and creating entire working applications from scratch. The amount of computing power we're using to train these models is doubling once every 3 and 1/2 months. AI is not going anywhere; we might as well just embrace the change and get it to work for us.
So as you can see here on the screen, we have the test-taking results of different large language models. In this case, it's comparing GPT 3.5 and GPT 4, some of the models released by OpenAI. And as you can see, it does relatively well in a bunch of different categories. Here we have AP Chemistry, physics, writing, US History. AI is becoming an expert in all domains, whereas humans can typically only be an expert in one, maybe two, max, over their entire lifetime. AI is an expert in everything. If you're able to leverage the expertise from all these different fields, you're going to unlock unprecedented problem-solving power. Now one person is able to tackle problems that would have taken an entire team.
What we're not going to do is give you a bunch of vocabulary to memorize, and I'm not going to go into what LLMs are. You're going to learn all that with time in this course. We're going to jump right into the AI tools because that's going to accelerate your journey down the line. I'll show you how to use AI to automate the boring stuff, make better decisions, and master new skills in record time.
All right, so we're going to focus on the AI chatbot, and we're going to pick one and learn it well. We have a bunch of options: we can choose Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, or chat GPT. In this example, we're going to go with chat GPT because it's the most popular at the time of this recording. And these are all going to be better in one way or another at whatever time you're listening to this video, but for the most part, their capabilities are going to be really similar. So just pick one and get good with it. After you get good with that one, then you can branch out to the other chatbots. We're also going to be exploring a lot of chat GPT's features, so if you want to follow along, then chat GPT is the way to go.
Now you might be wondering, do I need to pay to get access to the best models that are available? And my honest recommendation is, if you can afford it, absolutely. These models like GPT-4, Claude 3, Opus, or Google Gemini Ultra are the most capable large language models that are available to the public. So while you can definitely follow along this course using the free version, you're going to very quickly reach a point where you're going to feel bottlenecked by the capabilities of the model. It's not going to be as smart or think as intricately about stuff as you want it to. Well, that might be a time to upgrade, again, if you can afford it. No worries either way, and I'm not sponsored in any way by these guys; I'm just giving you my honest advice.
And keep that in mind anytime you're doing stuff with AI. If you run into a roadblock, you have three options: learn how to prompt better, upgrade to a different large language model, or a better one, a more capable one, or simply wait it out. Wait until a newer model is released. If you remember where AI was a year ago and how it is today, completely two different ball games here. So if those first two don't work, you can always just wait for the models to get better.
All right, without further ado, let's jump into the tools and get started. I'm going to open my internet browser and go to chat.gp.com. Here we can either log in or sign up. If you've never made an account, you'll sign up. I have an account, so I will log in, and I like to log in with my Google account. Here we have our chat interface; we can start chatting with the AI, seeing what all this hype is about. Right here, we're even greeted by the prompt: "Tell me a fun fact about the Roman Empire that is hilarious." So we obviously have to do that. "Oh, the Romans had a complex system of aqueducts. Who knew?" And if we want to start a new chat, you know, not related to the Roman Empire, we can go up here and click "New chat." I'm going to kind of give it a little test right now. So I just got done with a ride on my own bike, my new personal best—5 miles. Can you help me out with biking? While you may think it can't help because it's just a chatbot, one of the main use cases for tools like chat GPT is it's a really good learning tool; it's pretty much an interactive and personalized learning tool. Let's look at this response; it's giving a very long response here. "Congrats on my new personal best. Thank you. Mountain biking is an excellent way to stay fit and enjoy the great outdoors. I know. Here are some tips to help you improve your mountain biking skills and enjoy your rides even more: gear and equipment, bike maintenance—keep the chain clean and lubricated." So if we want to take action on some of this stuff and implement it in our lives, what we can do is: "Tell me about chain cleaning," and it's going to give me the tools and material needed. It's going to drill down into that topic, whereas when you're just Googling stuff, you have to constantly Google search and skim through the results to find your answer. This is going to let you personalize your own results. So here's a ton of instructions on how to do everything right, how to clean your bike chain step by step, and it may take a bit of refinement, right? If something is too complex, you want it a little simpler; if it's too long, you want it a little more concise. Say it tells you, "Here is the protective gear." Well, what if I really wanted to know what the material of my knee pads should be? It didn't tell me that cuz it just sort of made a best guess at my really short prompt. If I wanted more specific information, I have to give that back to the AI. It provides me its response, and we go back and forth iterating and iterating and iterating until we get to the desired result. Next time I know whenever I open chat GPT, I have to give it a little bit more detail. So this time I'll say, "For mountain biking, what materials are best for safety equipment? I want to push the boundaries and do extreme tricks, think Red Bull and X Games." Here we go. It gives the answer that I was looking for, right, the different types of materials. So that's just to show you that method of refinement in the back and forth.
So now it's your turn. Take 5 minutes, talk to the AI, tell it what you did today, and see how it can help. If you ever are unsure of how AI can help you in X situation, just ask it. It sounds kind of silly to say, right, and I hope it doesn't come off condescending, but if you ever get stuck, ask the AI for help first. And now look at you, in just a short time you've already got the basic skills to becoming an expert prompt engineer. The rest just comes from iterating on this refinement approach.
Now let's move on to the true art of prompt engineering. There are a million ways I could teach prompt engineering, but I'm going to show you what I use on a daily basis, so you don't need to refer to these huge cheat sheets. All right, so we're going to work on our prompting. Let's start with something fun again. Let's go with the fun fact about the Roman Empire. I'm sorry, I can't resist. "Romans used urine as a cleaning agent." Wow, coming in hot, chat GPT. So as you can see, it gave us a bunch of random facts. Let's say that's not what I wanted at all. I actually wanted a really brief response. Well, I could simply say, "Tell me, briefly summarize best ones." So it's giving, you know, some of the best ones in really short form, and that's how I generally prefer to work with AI. I don't like reading these long responses; I prefer it to distill the information for me. While I could also tell it, "Hey, be brief for the rest of this conversation," every time I start a new chat, it's going to forget those instructions. Well, the way we fix this is a really powerful feature in chat GPT called custom instructions. So to get to your custom instructions, you're going to click on your profile here, go to "Customize chat GPT." The first one is what we would like chat GPT to know about us to provide better responses. Second is how would we like chat GPT to respond, and we're going to enable this for any new chats we create. So what would we like chat GPT to know about us to provide better responses? Well, we could say, "First off, no fun facts about the Roman Empire," and P, just kidding, but seriously, it gives us the thought starters here: "Where are you based? What do you do for work? What are your hobbies and interests?" For the bottom one, "How formal or casual should chat GPT be? How long or short should responses generally be?" Let's start with the bottom one here, and we're we're going to just say, "Be extremely brief in every response," and click "Save." So we take the same prompt that we started this conversation with, where we got this long response. What do you think's going to happen when we put it in now with our new custom instructions? Well, it better be extremely brief, or else this video is going to be completely useless. So there you go: "Roman soldiers were paid partially in salt, which is where the word salary comes from." Very cool. This is sort of what I wanted, right? I didn't want those 20, 20 facts that are going to crowd my brain; I just wanted one. If there's one takeaway from this, I want you guys to fill in the custom instructions as much as you possibly can because it's going to tailor the AI to you. Another thing this is going to do is remember your instructions for the entire conversation. One of the limitations of these models right now is they will forget what you talked about earlier in a conversation if your conversation runs on long enough. So what the custom instructions do is it's constantly reminding the AI every response to follow those instructions, so very powerful. The key is going to be constantly iterating on these instructions, even copying them and pasting them into the conversation itself and asking chat GPT for help. These instructions should change with you and your goals, you know, making chat GPT your personal assistant. And that's it for today. So consider liking the video if I was able to help you out, subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any of my videos, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.