If your startup's entire technology stack is "provide a prompt to a system that you don't understand, which may or may not follow it accurately, and concatenate user-supplied strings directly into it", I don't really know what you expect...
On the other hand, having spent time with large language models (LLMs) and GPT-3 in particular, there really is an art to writing prompts, structuring them, etc.
I find it hard to defend a business model that has one specific prompt that makes or breaks the company... But there are definitely people who are skilled at writing prompts and I can see companies protecting their prompts (via patents? Trade secrets? Something else?) the way gene sequences are protected, ingredients for popular soft drinks are protected, or the way special molecules are protected.
Anyway, I find it fascinating how deep this line of thinking can go, all from the idea of a "one prompt company" protecting its special sequence of characters that unlocks a specific set of sequences in a LLM matrix! :)
That'll stop being the case in GPT-N. Prompt engineering might be a thing for a short time only.
The prompt is the only thing there is, it's all they will ever understand. Therefore, engineering prompts is the only way to get behavior out of them. That won't change unless the architecture changes, in which case, it isn't GPT-N.
Isn't this also the case whenever you employ a human being to do anything?
These attacks are not unlike "social engineering", I guess the AI is just particularly naïve. Maybe the solution is to have a second AI inspect the behavior of the first one to double check it was not fooled.