Prompt Engineering for LLMs

Chapter 8. Conversational Agency

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In Chapter 3, we covered the departure from text completion models to chat models. A chat model by itself is only aware of the information covered in training and whatever information the user has just told it. The chat model is unable to reach out into the world and learn about information that was unavailable during training, and it’s unable to interact with the world and take external actions on behalf of the user.

The LLM community is making great headway in overcoming these limitations through conversational agency. Agency is the ability of an entity to complete tasks and achieve goals in a self-directed and autonomous manner. The conversational agents that we discuss in this chapter provide an experience similar to chat—a back-and-forth dialogue between a user and an assistant—but add in the ability for the assistant to reach out to the real world, learn new information, and interact with real-world ...