The Rise of the AI Engineer
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The Rise of the AI Engineer
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Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#2hi HN! am writing this up as a recap of the enhanced role of code in LLM applications, and the emerging professionalization that will happen as a result. would welcome any and all feedback!
I'm also soft launching the conference I am planning for Oct. Join us if you are in SF (will be streamed) https://ai.engineer/
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#3Hey Shawn! Always enjoy your writing.
I think you've done well laying out what a lot of people want "AI Engineer" to mean at this moment in time. My concern (coming fresh out of the absolute semantic nightmare that was the "serverless" community) is that the term AI is so hopelessly overloaded, and has been such a moving target over the years, that it's unlikely that a plurality of people will ever share your mental model of what an "AI Engineer" is/ does / knows / is paid.
Personally I've been using Generative Engineering / GenEng [0] to describe the professional practice of building stuff with AI as your pair programmer. I recognize some are pulling away from the term "generative", but to me it feels like a better anchor into the specific flavor of AI we're talking about.
[0] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/t...
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#4When you see the taxonomy of AI and ML you will learn that saying "AI engineer" is vague and essentially useless.
Do you use depth first search at work? Congratulations, you are an AI engineer.
Do you use any form of search or information retrieval at work? Congratulations again.
Do you have a system that makes decisions based on a decision tree? Again, congratulations.
In fact, stop using "AI" at all. Your washing machine is an AI agent, it uses fuzzy logic.
Are you using LLMs? then just say you work with LLMs.
Search engineers don't call themselves AI engineers.
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#5For this conference, I think it would also be great to have a presentation about job requirements at various levels, then continue to cite that presentation often.
It's important to have an on-ramp for people interested in this space with well-known requirements to aim for.
This also makes it easy for companies to know what they're getting with this title. The ambiguity of full stack engineers meant that it was a dumping ground for responsibilities.
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#6For this conference, I think it would also be great to have a presentation about job requirements at various levels, then continue to cite that presentation often. It's important to have an on-ramp for people interested in this space with well-known requirements to aim for. This also makes it easy for companies to know what they're getting with this title. The ambiguity of full stack engineers meant that it was a dum…
It feels far too early to me for there to be any clarity on job requirements.
If I was hiring for an "AI engineer", I'd want to see examples of things they had built.
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#7I'm a natural skeptic, and I believe we're still on the rising edge of the "AI" hype cycle. Five years ago, it was "blockchain", and everyone was trying to ram blockchain into everything, attracting lots of VC and media attention, etc. It seems that blockchain is beyond the honeymoon phase: I haven't seen an NFT or even a Bitcoin headline in HN for a while.
So I'm trying to wrap my head around what an "AI Engineer" is. As I see it, it's all about calling a function that takes some text as an input, and getting some text as output. That function, of course, is being run on some big hardware that in most cases, you don't own. So is the "engineering" part of this finessing the input and massaging the output? Do most "AI Engineers" actually understand what's going on in that function, beyond what they learned in the "LLM 101" videos and articles that have been flooding the web over the past year?
While an application developer doesn't need to know all of the ins-and-outs of the underlying operating systems they run on, those developers that do have a deep understanding of the OS are the ones who write more performant code, and can really get to the bottom of issues that arise do to how their code uses the OS. Can the same be said of "AI Engineers"?
All of a sudden, everyone's an AI Engineer. Where where these experts hiding five years ago?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#8If you are someone who was working in LLMs/Generative AI before it got "cool", The market has fundamentally changed and changed extremely in your favor.
Talent is extremely scarce and expensive right now in this space. Ask for well above FAANG compensation. Try to shop around for offers. I had 4 offers and a bidding war for my talent (with no leetcode - but I have an extensive github and publications about LLMs), when previously these same companies would have brutally leetcoded me.
I thought that there would be a ton of people getting really good really fast with Generative AI. It turns out that most people are terrible at using the tools, and there's even research about this right now - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581388
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#9I'm a natural skeptic, and I believe we're still on the rising edge of the "AI" hype cycle. Five years ago, it was "blockchain", and everyone was trying to ram blockchain into everything, attracting lots of VC and media attention, etc. It seems that blockchain is beyond the honeymoon phase: I haven't seen an NFT or even a Bitcoin headline in HN for a while. So I'm trying to wrap my head around what an "AI Engineer" i…
Imagine comparing blockchain and AI.
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#10Hey Shawn! Always enjoy your writing. I think you've done well laying out what a lot of people want "AI Engineer" to mean at this moment in time. My concern (coming fresh out of the absolute semantic nightmare that was the "serverless" community) is that the term AI is so hopelessly overloaded, and has been such a moving target over the years, that it's unlikely that a plurality of people will ever share your mental…
Maybe Text Processing Engineer or Text Engineer for short could express well that this person handles both text analysis and synthesis. It is analogous to the term Data Engineer, which describes someone that handles data processing and pipelines in general.