**DSPy vs. thin wrappers for prompts (OpenAI API, MiniChain, basic templating)** In other words: _Why can't I just write my prompts directly as string templates?_ Well, for extremely simple settings, this _might_ work just fine. (If you're familiar with neural networks, this is like expressing a tiny two-layer NN as a Python for-loop. It kinda works.) However, when you need higher quality (or manageable cost), then you need to iteratively explore multi-stage decomposition, improved prompting, data bootstrapping, careful finetuning, retrieval augmentation, and/or using smaller (or cheaper, or local) models. The true expressive power of building with foundation models lies in the interactions between these pieces. But every time you change one piece, you likely break (or weaken) multiple other components. **DSPy** cleanly abstracts away (_and_ powerfully optimizes) the parts of these interactions that are external to your actual system design. It lets you focus on designing the module-level interactions: the _same program_ expressed in 10 or 20 lines of **DSPy** can easily be compiled into multi-stage instructions for `GPT-4`, detailed prompts for `Llama2-13b`, or finetunes for `T5-base`. Oh, and you wouldn't need to maintain long, brittle, model-specific strings at the core of your project anymore.
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