“It’s very easy to make a prototype,” Henley says. “It’s very hard to production-ize it.” Prompt engineering seems like a big piece of the puzzle when you’re building a prototype, Henley says, but many other considerations come into play when you’re making a commercial-grade product.
Challenges of making a commercial product include ensuring reliability—for example, failing gracefully when the model goes offline; adapting the model’s output to the appropriate format, since many use cases require outputs other than text; testing to make sure the AI assistant won’t do something harmful in even a small number of cases; and ensuring safety, privacy, and compliance. Testing and compliance are particularly difficult, Henley says, as traditional software-development testing strategies are maladapted for nondeterministic LLMs.
To fulfill these myriad tasks, many large companies are heralding a new job title: Large Language Model Operations, or LLMOps, which includes prompt engineering in its life cycle but also entails all the other tasks needed to deploy the product. Henley says LLMOps’ predecessors, machine learning operations (MLOps) engineers, are best positioned to take on these jobs.
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