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Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer
- spaced-out 4y agoNo coding required...yet. 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). Having a way to manage the meta aspects of story generation would be a big help.
- truculent 4y agoI’ve wondered if it would be helpful to teach the model a micro-DSL for the given task at hand, and use that for greater control and precision.
- antibasilisk 4y agoIt's helpful for doing things like mathematical reasoning, since the LLM can't really do it directly. A DSL would allow you to offload that reasoning.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y agoA node editor would be interesting [1], although it might be a recipe for spaghetti prompt [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node_graph_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node_graph_architecture [2] https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com
- lampshades 4y agohttps://archive.ph/Og0Sa https://archive.ph/Og0Sa
- lampshades 4y agoSo, what does being a prompt engineer pay these days? And how do you find a job doing it? Edit: maybe I should have kept reading. > 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.)
- staunton 4y agoProfessional 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?
- SillyUsername 4y agoWe don't need a new job position, what we really need is a LLM to generate good prompts...
- jaggederest 4y agoIn all seriousness I've found that asking them to generate their own prompts can be very useful. It's a bit like a perl script that outputs a perl script.
- itronitron 4y agoYou just need an LLM to generate random prompts and a sweatshop in Manila that filters out the bad ones.
- pkaye 4y agoJust put a couple AI in a sweatshop to do the filtering. By sweatshop I mean the AI computers gets all crammed together with no cooling to same money.
- arthurcolle 4y agois this a college dorm metaphor? Haha
- barking_biscuit 4y agoIt has been amazing to watch the feedback loop with tools like Stable Diffusion where you see two types of strategy for solving problems of missing functionality. The first strategy is coming up with some long winded manual process involving disparate tools and several steps. The other is simply train a model to do what it is you want automatically. It has fast taught me that there is no competing with this new paradigm, and those capable of being able to solve their problems by building models will totally leapfrog those that have to do things the old way.
- Syntonicles 4y ago
- superdisk 4y agoI just can't believe how idiotic such a thing is. It's like calling a person who uses a toaster a Toast Engineer with a salary of 300k.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vsareto 4y ago>Notably, chain of thought (CoT) prompting, a recent technique for eliciting complex multi-step reasoning through step-by-step answer examples, achieved the state-of-the-art performances in arithmetics and symbolic reasoning, difficult system-2 tasks that do not follow the standard scaling laws for LLMs https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916 >https://sites.google.com/view/automatic-prompt-engineer https://sites.google.com/view/automatic-prompt-engineer Not exactly a "toaster go brrrr" job, but it could be obsolete one day WaPo does need to chill though. There’s barely any Prompt Engineer jobs Edit: If anyone's curious, I've been following this for prompt stuff: https://github.com/dair-ai/Prompt-Engineering-Guide https://github.com/dair-ai/Prompt-Engineering-Guide
- usea 4y agoIt's just software. It takes skill and labor to achieve the outputs you want. Is someone who uses photoshop all day not an artist? Or someone who writes text for a compiler not a programmer? You've got a huge blind spot if you think prompt engineer isn't already a thing.
- vba616 4y ago>You've got a huge blind spot if you think prompt engineer isn't already a thing. It may be a "thing", because generating BS is a viable business model and ChatGPT makes it more efficient. ..but I submit as a working hypothesis, that it is completely impossible to gain knowledge you do not already possess from a language model, no matter how clever your prompting. I'm very interested in counter-examples, but I have seen a few that turn out to be fake already.
- yacine_ 4y agoyou 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. https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06541 https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06541 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.
- roflyear 4y agoSounds fun until I realized much of this will be requests to use GPT for stuff it isn't meant to be used for. That would constantly trigger me.
- barking_biscuit 4y agoThat presumes we know what it's meant to be used for. I'm not sure that we do.
- roflyear 4y agoWell true, but I think we know some things it shouldn't be used for at least!
- andrewstuart 4y agoI 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? Crazy.
- WesolyKubeczek 4y agoI'm just wondering what's gonna happen if OpenAI either sinks or limits its APIs severely like Facebook did in its time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- smcl 4y agoWeird how ChatGPT popped up as a newly hyped Next Big Thing just as crypto crashed. Probably not worth thinking about.
- ur-whale 4y ago> just as crypto crashed Did crypto crash? Last I looked BTC was at 20K USD a pop ... strange definition of a crash for something that used to trade below a dollar.
- smcl 4y agoCrypto boomed, had billions sunk into it and has had multiple high profile implosions. Yes it has absolutely crashed.
- arthurcolle 4y agoCrypto market cap is still around ~1T USD
- smcl 4y agoIf you want to be part of it do not let me stop you.
- ur-whale 4y ago> Crypto boomed, had billions sunk into it and has had multiple high profile implosions Same thing it's been doing every year since 2011. Yet BTC is still trading at 20k USD ... I'm not sure we have the same definition of the word "crash". But whatever floats your boat, man.
- smcl 4y agoMay your investment go To The Moon
- manquer 4y ago
- camjw 4y agoIf anyone reading this wants to do a bit of prompt engineering professionally we're hiring at Channel (https://usechannel.com https://usechannel.com) and you can get in touch with me (Cameron, one of the cofounders) at cameron@usechannel.com
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ed-209 4y agoI 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).
- taylorius 4y agoHere's a prompt I just engineered - "Flash in the pan".
- tymonPartyLate 4y agoI'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 :)
- notpachet 4y agoThis 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. 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.
- travisjungroth 4y agoSEO optimization is at the other end. It would be like trying to get your data picked up by the model training. Prompts are equivalent to search queries.
- mycall 4y agoPrompt engineering is another way to say functional specification imho.
- spoonjim 4y agoLarge 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.
- neilv 4y agoEarly in Web, I saw job posts for "HTML Programmer". (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`.) 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. 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.
- simonw 4y agoSince 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: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/21/in-defense-of-prompt-engineering/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/21/in-defense-of-prompt-e...
- precompute 4y agoThese jobs will never fly as fast as when OpenAI announces an official PromptWhiz certification course.
- antibasilisk 4y agoHot? 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.
- Art9681 4y agoReading 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. 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. 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".
- grufus 4y ago> 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 Maybe they realized that too many jumped on the blockchain BS train.
- I_AM_A_SMURF 4y agoI don't know how I feel about prompt engineers yet but, isn't Sidney (Bing's AI) basically all prompt engineering on top of ChatGPT?
- pketh 4y agoI’d rather be a sandwich artist