There are a couple types of roles that sounds really interesting to me. One would be taking some proprietary data and training LLM in a format it could use. One company I know has a database of cars. They want to train their LLM with some inventory facts like "We have a Ford Mustang on the lot whose vin is ABC123 and it has the following features...". And then another role would be writing the prompts for API calls to the LLM. "Write a report on all cars currently in the lot which are available for sale and have the following features...."
The Rise of the AI Engineer
11–20 of 159 posts
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#12Hey 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…
Generative isn't perfect for similar reasons perhaps, I consider procedural generarion adjacent to machine learning based generation so it would need to encompass both to make sense to me.
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#13I'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…
> Where where these experts hiding five years ago?
Prompt engineering has been around for a few years already, and there are a lot of existing ML engineers who have been able to quickly learn how to adapt their skills.
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#14I can see a world where "ML Engineer" (or similar) is someone that's hired to solve a known problem (whether it be with classifiers, LLMs, neural nets, etc), whereas a "AI Engineer" (or whatever the title) is hired to figure out how the hell to capitalize on the AI hype, without a specific problem to solve.
IMO right now we're entering the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" in Gartner's hype cycle model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle#/media/File...
Lots of companies want to jump on the AI bandwagon, but they don't really know what to do or how to leverage it.
What the LLM community needs now is for companies to leverage and productize these LLM models for truly game changing use cases. If that doesn't happen soon, the hype will start to fade and lose momentum ("trough of disillusionment").
I'd really love to see some killer use cases emerge soon.
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#15There are a couple types of roles that sounds really interesting to me. One would be taking some proprietary data and training LLM in a format it could use. One company I know has a database of cars. They want to train their LLM with some inventory facts like "We have a Ford Mustang on the lot whose vin is ABC123 and it has the following features...". And then another role would be writing the prompts for API calls t…
This doesn’t seem like a thing any business should need AI for.
Filtering a known list for a report takes a few seconds at most, and is much more reliable than LLMs.
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#16The rise of the monkey king of infinite monkeys
I'm using LLM for many things, but let's not pretend it's engineering
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#17Oh God, this is going to be like DevOps all over again isn't it? Where there's people constantly gluing together things from different companies.
I foresee layers and layers of abstraction dependent not on technology spec but on some company's poorly maintained docs and apis that you get by calling some service rep.
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#18I'm not sure I agree with their reasoning. There are a lot of generalist backend/infra engineers who are working in the AI space. What is the special skillset that distinguishes them from all others? If you say that they are "AI engineers" because they are working on AI as a product, then should we also have "advertising engineers", "billing engineers", "API engineers"?
The reality is that tons of people just build a trivial app calling an OpenAI API and put "AI engineer" on their resume to capitalize on the hype.
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#19I'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.
LLMs and GenAI are already useful at scale but the current hype that they will lead to infinitely generalizable models, myriad groundbreaking applications in all fields and industries, or even AGI could be overblown - let's at least admit that as a possibility.
Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer
#20AI/ML Engineers will be our modern day variant of the Mystic. They'll whisper sweet nothings into the ears of their models, looking at the goat entrails of what their models output and tell us of their predictions.
It's going to be a shit show.