  Large language models (LLMs) show impressive abilities via few-shot
prompting. Commercialized APIs such as OpenAI GPT-3 further increase their use
in real-world language applications. However, the crucial problem of how to
improve the reliability of GPT-3 is still under-explored. While reliability is
a broad and vaguely defined term, we decompose reliability into four main
facets that correspond to the existing framework of ML safety and are
well-recognized to be important: generalizability, social biases, calibration,
and factuality. Our core contribution is to establish simple and effective
prompts that improve GPT-3's reliability as it: 1) generalizes
out-of-distribution, 2) balances demographic distribution and uses natural
language instructions to reduce social biases, 3) calibrates output
probabilities, and 4) updates the LLM's factual knowledge and reasoning chains.
With appropriate prompts, GPT-3 is more reliable than smaller-scale supervised
models on all these facets. We release all processed datasets, evaluation
scripts, and model predictions. Our systematic empirical study not only sheds
new insights on the reliability of prompting LLMs, but more importantly, our
prompting strategies can help practitioners more reliably use LLMs like GPT-3.
