Meta-Prompting and what it tells us about a bias for code

Key Points:

• Meta-prompting acts as a multi-expert system, breaking down tasks for specialized model instances to tackle, improving accuracy in areas like programming and creative writing.
• The "distribution of experts" strategy leverages the model's wide-ranging knowledge, assigning tasks to the most suitable "expert" within the model.
• Code tasks see improved performance due to the model's programming language proficiency, showcasing its dual capability for specialized and general reasoning.
• The paper highlights the effectiveness of meta-prompting in tasks such as sonnet writing, demonstrating significant accuracy improvements with and without code.

A new paper from Stanford and OpenAI offers us a glimpse into the "mind" of GPT4 and its bias for code.

Meta-prompting is a technique that enhances language models' performance by acting as a multi-expert system. It breaks complex tasks into smaller parts, assigns them to specialized instances within the same model, and integrates the outputs. This method significantly improves task accuracy, including in programming and creative writing, by leveraging a model's ability to execute code in real-time and apply diverse expert knowledge.

The approach is task-agnostic, simplifying user interaction without needing detailed instructions for each task, and demonstrates the potential for broad applicability in enhancing model utility and accuracy. The task-agnostic nature of meta-prompting suggests there are good general-purpose applications in interface design but also for the regular user of tools like ChatGPT, even accounting for their more constrained nature.