Google researchers say you can tell AI to 'take a deep breath and work on this problem step by step' to improve its accuracy

• Google DeepMind researchers published a study on September 7 on how simple prompts could improve AI's accuracy.
• "Take a deep breath and work on this problem step by step" was the most effective phrase tested, per the study.
• When the phrase was used, Google's PaLM 2 AI model was 80% accurate with math problems, compared to 34% without it.

Asking Google's PaLM 2 artificial intelligence to "take a deep breath and work on this problem step by step" was the most effective prompt tested by Google DeepMind researchers to improve AI's accuracy, according to a study published on September 7.

Their study aimed to see how simple prompts could improve the performance of large language models, like ChatGPT's GPT-4 or Google's PaLM 2. It is not clear how many prompts were used during the study.

When prompted with the phrase, researchers found that Google's PaLM 2 model was 80% accurate while responding to a set of grade school math problems.

The creators of the over 8,500 math problems used in the study wrote that a "bright middle school student" should be able to solve all of them.

Without the prompt, the model was merely 34% accurate in answering the math problems, per the study. Meanwhile, prompting the AI with "let's think step by step" saw an increase in accuracy to 71%.

The researchers automated the process of testing a large number of different phrases with a variety of AI models to understand which prompts would work best.

To add context to these findings, a 2022 joint study by researchers at Google and the University of Tokyo found that getting large language models to "think step by step" improved their accuracy.

ChatGPT's launch in November has sparked curiosity over how we should be speaking to AI to get the outcomes we desire. Some companies are even hiring "prompt engineers" who specialize in crafting questions and phrases for AI to improve its responses.

Anna Bernstein, a prompt engineer working for AI company Copy.ai, told Insider in August that to get the most out of the prompts, one should use a thesaurus and pay closer attention to verbs.

Some groups have even put together "prompt libraries" to share phrases to get the most out of AI — like OpenAI's Discord community, where developers share sample phrases to get ChatGPT to help with job interviews.

Google and the study's authors did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider, sent outside regular business hours.