-: Alright, we're gonna learn about the technique.
Let's think step by step.
So this is a magic word
or a magic phrase you can include in order
to improve the reasoning of your AI.
The one problem that you run into pretty frequently,
even with messaging bots
is it doesn't really know the answer.
It might hallucinate the answer,
or like it's saying here, it doesn't have real time data,
so it can start to fail.
So you're saying, you know,
New York City had 500 professional window washers,
so either like refuses to answer or it'll make something up.
I don't think that 500 professional window washers is enough
for all of New York City, but we'll see.
One really simple way
you can just improve things as you say.
Let's think step by step,
and this works particularly well with mathematical
or like kind of linear driven type reasoning.
This is using Fermi estimation.
Enrico Fermi was famous for breaking things down
step by step and then estimating each step.
So let's see how this works for GPT4.
Okay, so it's saying we don't know
how many window washers there are.
We can make an estimate.
There are 12,000 people employed
as building cleaning workers in the USA.
New York is one of the cities
with the most high rise in the world.
So let's say 10% of all window washers work here.
And then so there could be part-time
and New York has 1% of the window washers.
Given all these considerations that it'd be anywhere
from 1,000 to 2,000 window washers, potentially even more.
So the really useful thing here is one,
it actually gets to a better answer between 1
and 2,000, which I think is closer to the real number.
But you can also see the steps in logic.
So if it's faulty in some of its logic, you can go back
and correct it and you can say,
actually maybe you know that like New York has 50%
of all the windows in the US or whatever.
You could actually correct that assumption
and then you can arrive at a better estimate.
So it not only helps the AI give you a better estimate,
but it also shows you the reasoning
that it can prompt your own thinking on the topic
and understand how it approaches things.
Thinking step by step, it's just a magical phrase
that helps a lot in terms of the results.