This isn't anything new. We've had prompt engineers for a long time now; we've just been calling them "SEO Specialists". The kind of person you'd hire to make sure your Amazon listing has all the necessary magical incantations to land on the first page of search results, that sort of thing.<p>This is just the next incarnation of trying to shift the output of someone else's algorithm in your favor. Be wary of building a career on top of that. It's very easy for the algorithm owner to change things up and obviate any value you used to provide.
I remember how silly I thought it sounded when I first heard of the job "Web Master"..... like someone whose ONLY JOB is the World Wide Web? wtf?<p>Crazy.
you can automatically learn soft prompts with backprop so.. the job "prompt engineering" isn't going to stick around for too long given it's automatable.<p><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06541" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06541</a><p>That is not to say, that integrating LLMs won't create a lot of jobs. Think of it as systems engineering. Knowing how computers work, as well as a software engineer does, will always be useful.
Early in Web, I saw job posts for "HTML Programmer".<p>(This was before JS, before CSS, etc. Mostly just your original HTML simplified LaTeX article.cls elements, plus `A` and `IMG`, and maybe a `FONT`.)<p>HTML was easier to use than many word processors, but because it was new and unfamiliar, yet looked like it might be huge... for a brief period, practically anyone who could spell "HTML" or "WWW" could posture as a whiz kid, and make big bucks.<p>I'd guess that "prompt engineer" will evolve into real careers soon, but the nature of the technology and the role will be very different than it is this quarter.
No coding required...yet.<p>I've been playing around with generating stories with ChatGPT for a while and...English (or any natural language) is really bad at being specific. I've made progress by learning some specific words to describe the type of scene I want and how much of it I want ChatGPT to generate (such as a scene for just that evening verses a few paragraphs describing weeks of traveling). I've also started getting some intuition for when I've given ChatGPT too much info (it'll cram all the facts in in weird ways) and too little info (it'll get really random and start inserting new characters and stuff).<p>Having a way to manage the meta aspects of story generation would be a big help.
So, what does being a prompt engineer pay these days? And how do you find a job doing it?<p>Edit: maybe I should have kept reading.<p>> Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees and the maker of a language-AI system called Claude, recently listed a job opening for a “prompt engineer and librarian” in San Francisco with a salary ranging up to $335,000. (Must “have a creative hacker spirit and love solving puzzles,” the listing states.)
Reading the comments here, there is something to be said about how much naysaying there is in regard to this technology. I should expect it. You see the same pattern everywhere in one way or another. I urge people to shift their mindsets and approach cutting edge technology from a perspective of what it could be in the future, vs what it is today. What I mean is, by the time you realize something has fundamentally changed society, you've missed the train.<p>In the end what we all value is what solves problems. Those who embrace AI tech and learn to use the tool and work around its flaws will solve more problems than those who don't. This includes coming up with a system to validate the work. Those who use the tool recklessly will create more problems than they solve.<p>What side are we on here? I've been in the industry for over two decades and I for one cannot wait to command the computer in complex ways in my natural language. I am not threatened by other people being able to do the same. The tool is just a tool. What you build with it is what will separate the "professionals" from the "hobbyists".
Since this post will inevitably bring out the usual comments that prompt engineering is dumb and a waste of time, here's my rebuttal to that: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/21/in-defense-of-prompt-engineering/" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/21/in-defense-of-prompt-e...</a>
Professional prompt engineers:
journalists, police interrogators, detectives and private investigators, most people working in sales, most people working in the judicial system, politicians, many people working in "HR", ... maybe "tech jobs" will no longer be a meaningful designation anymore in a few decades?
I'm currently tinkering on a customer support bot with langchain and gpt3. The bot can answer questions about services and their terms, it can use tools to make bookings and perform some taks like scheduling appointments, in a conversational manner.
It's becoming clear to me that subtle changes in the prompt can lead to bullshit answers and gpt making up facts, despite being specifically told not to do so.
If the prompt reaches some complexity threshold, the output quality goes down visibly. I learned that I have to split the bot into subtasks, each having different, smaller, prompts.
So, yeah, I believe prompt engineering can be a thing. At least for a while, until the models become smarter at understanding what we want from them :)
Hot? I've seen like 3 postings for prompt engineers and all of them had extreme requirements. The idea that prompt engineering will magically one-to-one replace software engineering is ridiculous, the whole point of technology is to make things more efficient which necessarily makes a certain amount of the workforce redundant after it reaches a certain amount of efficiency.
I don't know how close AI is to replacing software engineers generally, but pretty sure this prompt engineer job isn't going to age well. And for extra irony, the better they do at their job, the greater will be the dependence upon the tech and the incentive to eliminate the middle-man (ie. the human).
Large models are programmed with prompts. This is really just a “software engineering” job where the programming language looks enough like English to make it look easy.
If anyone reading this wants to do a bit of prompt engineering professionally we're hiring at Channel (<a href="https://usechannel.com" rel="nofollow">https://usechannel.com</a>) and you can get in touch with me (Cameron, one of the cofounders) at cameron@usechannel.com