Here are the key points from the video:

  • Alex is a prompt engineer at Anthropic who helps people get the most out of Claude AI with a focus on safety.

  • He got into prompt engineering after reading Anthropic’s paper on “Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms”.

  • Prompt engineering is the practice of optimizing prompts to get the best response from language models.

  • Anthropic takes an empirical, test-driven approach to prompt engineering.

  • 5 tips for getting the best performance from Claude:

    • Describe the task clearly and specifically
    • Use XML tags to mark different parts of the prompt
    • Provide a wide range of examples
    • Make use of the long context (up to 100,000 tokens)
    • Allow Claude time to “think” through the response using thinking tags