What is a prompt in AI?

It can be a question, a request, a text to summarize or a mix of all of that. To the model, the prompt is the start of the text it has to continue: what it answers comes from there and from what it learned in training.

Many apps also add a system prompt: instructions the user does not see that set the tone, role or rules of the assistant.

Writing good prompts (what is called prompt engineering) means giving context, saying what format you want, showing examples and asking for one clear thing at a time.

Related terms

• Context window: The context window is the maximum number of tokens a model can take into account at once: your message, the conversation, any documents and its own answer.
• Temperature: Temperature is a setting that controls how much randomness a model uses when picking the next token: low gives more predictable answers, high gives more varied ones.
• Hallucination: A hallucination is when an AI model generates false or made-up information and presents it with full confidence, as if it were a real fact.