You can do amazing things with artificial intelligence — if you know how to write (and rewrite) great AI prompts.

I didn’t. So I talked to my colleague Theo Bleier, an AI engineer who spends his days tinkering with the pre-built prompts that you see when you use Notion AI. Now I’m able to explain how you can wield generative AI’s staggering power to enhance your work and life, starting today.

Note: all the prompts and responses in this post were done in Notion AI. But the principles we discuss should work similarly in any standard large language model (LLM).

Let’s start by thinking about how LLMs actually work

Large language models (LLMs) like Notion AI, ChatGPT and Llama use datasets comprising vast amounts of language — the equivalent of millions of books, web pages, and so on. They turn each word (or parts of a word) in these billions of sentences into a token, then rank every token according to how often it’s used next to every other token in that dataset.

When you prompt an AI model, it uses these rankings to study your request and send back what it considers an ideal response. For simple prompts, this process seems fairly straightforward.

What is the capital of Pennsylvania?

          

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            The capital of Pennsylvania is Harrisburg.
This is good
            
          
          
  
          
The capital of Pennsylvania is Harrisburg.
This is good