The BEST Way to Summarize Anything With GPT-4o

It's 2024 and I still see people prompting summaries like this. Now, I guarantee you that there's better ways to do this. In this video, it's going to show you exactly that in the form of one improved summarization prompt and one advanced technique that has been published in a research paper that I haven't really seen anybody cover. By the way, it seems like people enjoy these prompting tutorials, so I start doing one a week, always picking a specific technique. And I'll show you how to do it to the best of my ability inside of a large language model like GPT4O chat GPT, dude. But this will absolutely, absolutely work in any other large language model of your choice. Alright, to keep this super applicable to what you're doing, we'll be working with a Wikipedia article that we'll be summarizing here. I'll just prompt a random country. Perfect. And then we're gonna search for Brazil on Wikipedia. Opening Brazil's article will do the most basic thing, which is simply copying all the text in the Wikipedia article. Later in the video, I'll show you some other ways you could pull this text into ChatGPT and some good alternatives for copy pasting. But this is the most basic and most reliable way to do it. So. So as mentioned, most people simply do this. They just say, summarize this and look, it's okay. Okay, but let me tell you, I haven't used this concrete prompt in over a year because a slightly extended version of this just works so much better and it's not even too long. Check this out. You're a secretary of target audience here. We give it a role. And this is the main part. You get to pick the target audience. So if I'm a YouTube creator focused on history videos, I would insert that here. And then it continues. Summarize the text given to you in five bullet points. Now look, you could absolutely delete this part, but I use this pretty much every single time because sometimes AI summaries can be a bit lengthy for me. I'd rather get five bullet points. Obviously you can change this number depending on what you're doing. And as mentioned, this is the simplest way to do it. More advanced one coming up in a second here. But let's just give it a shot just to keep things fair. I'll keep the five bullet point parts right here. Now really the only difference here is the target audience and the role you give it. So head on over to the Brazil Wikipedia article. Copy all the text like so, paste and Run, paste and run. Now look, I'll be honest with you, not every single time is this going to make a difference, right? I had to rerun this prompt two times to actually get what I was looking for. Something tailored towards a history youtuber. This looks great. As opposed to the normal summary. It categorizes it by the different categories that might be relevant to me as a history YouTuber. Simply put, this is easier to work with than this. But I suggest we move on to level two, which is the further extension of this prompt. And here are the four so called building blocks that you can add to to the prompt. So you could add the tone. My favorite one here would actually be in the style of an 11 year old. It's a great way to get simplistic summaries that are understandable by everybody. You could specify a goal that you have. So if you only care about the 16th century, include that. You could also specify the length. So the five bullet points is a version of that. But you could also use a word counter. Now it never gets it precisely right, but it will land somewhere in the ballpark. So if you say 100 words it might give you anywhere from 80 to 120, but it won't give you 360. And this is a bonus one that I sometimes use if I want direct quotes. Maybe this would be even more relevant if you're running the summary on an interview. So this is what the prompt looks like if I include all the building blocks now I'll just paste the article yet again and we can compare the summaries and then we can get to the most advanced version of summarizing inside of ChatGPT or other LLMs. And now look, it only highlights the parts in the 1600s. It's in the style of an 11 year old and there's no quotes because if you look at the Wikipedia article, there are no people speaking, there's nothing to quote. So in this case it just skipped those instructions. I highlighted it because it's important to understand why I did that. What if you want a really concise summary and you have a little bit of time to play with it? That's why we use a technique highlighted in a research paper from 2023. It's called GPT4 Summarization with Chain of density prompting. And the chain of density prompt looks as follows. This is the prompt right here. They shared it in this paper, but basically I copy pasted it into the video's description for you. So what you can do now is you can open A new chat and you can simply paste the prompt from the description. This is it. It starts with article and ends with remember, use the exact same number of words for each summary. Now this is set up to work with an article, but that is a super universal term. So anything you have you can put inside of these quotation marks here. And I won't even go into the explanation, I'll simply give it the Brazil article and we'll see what we get here and explain as we go. Paste and run this and I'll keep the original summarized this in five bullet points on the left so you can compare. But basically what the chain of density prompt does is, is it starts with a summary and then it looks at that and then it sees if it can compress it more and add more into it. Now this does create multiple versions of the summary, so you do have to make a choice. Whereas this is just what it is. It's the five bullet point summary. But from my experience, usually the fourth, sometimes the fifth summary is actually the best thing you can get outside of ChatGPT. So look, you can pause the video here if you want and look at the first one versus the fourth one. But if I just start counting the amount of facts stated in this summary, it's so much more dense than the first one. Meaning this works and I do use this regularly. Two small but important details, details to round this out. First of all, what can you summarize? Because I showed you how to copy paste things, you might be aware of that, but what else are your options here with either one of these prompts? Well, first things first, with the new browsing function, even the free users can now just share the link. And if I run this, it will automatically pick up on the fact that it needs to use the web browser. It will look for it and I will get a similar result to copy pasting the whole article. But just keep in mind, whenever you use browsing, it is more concise than just using the LLM look, it's the same prompt, copy, pasting the text. And with browsing now, another thing you can obviously do is upload files, right? So if you have a PDF that you want to summarize, like this one, you can simply take this, upload it into GPT and then you can do the same thing. It just reads the PDF and summarizes it for you. There you go, two more options. One is uploading images. So if you take a picture of an article or a page in a book or something, you can absolutely upload that and it will read the text. I would say this one is the least preferable because with images it's just very hard to get a lot of text into ChatGPT. But the last one which is super useful you could either use Google Drive or OneDrive to download directly upload your docs from the drive. And the very last point is okay Igor, great I have this chain of density prompt. What do I do with it? Well you either store it in your prompt organizer. If you sign up to a free newsletter you get one with the sign up or you turn it into a GPT which makes quickly accessing it really really simple. And that's summarization. No need for any paid app that does this for you. You can always do this inside of ChatGPT or Claude Gemini Llama free and if you care to learn more techniques like this, I created a playlist with other videos that teach you practical AI skills like this that you can put to work today.