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The Rise of the AI Engineer

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Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#51

Post by ryandrake »

chefandy wrote: post #37
cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #7

I'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? I'll bet that many of them were trying to ram blockchain into everything! Personally, I'm curiously watching emerging prompt pen testing scene. It brings a tear of cyberpunk joy to my eye to consider that we've built important, powerful systems advanced enough to be vulnerable to social engineering attacks... and pretty dumb ones, too.

What we're seeing now is a frantic attempt by companies to ram "AI" into everything. Some force (Wall Street?) is expecting companies to say "We're using AI." What do you need it for? "We don't know, but damn we've got to use it for something!"

A few years ago, few were talking about AI. Today, if it's not somehow crammed into your product roadmap, you might as well start looking for another job.

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#52

Post by cj »

swyx wrote: post #45
cj wrote: post #14

I 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.wiki…

(author here) There are at least 4 killer apps ($100m/yr revenue potential) so far: 1. Generative Text for writing - Jasper AI going 0 to $75m ARR in 2 years 2. Generative Art for non-artists - Midjourney has by some accounts $80m ARR 3. Copilot for knowledge workers - GitHub’s Copilot has roughly 50-80m ARR as well 4. Conversational AI UX - ChatGPT probably has >$100m ARR by now, Bing Chat has brought $m's worth of…

> what else do you need to see to believe? (geniune question)

It's not that I don't believe in LLMs.

It's that the level of media attention AI is getting isn't backed by the same level of real world use cases, yet. (All of the use cases you listed are awesome, no denying that, but I don't think those alone justify the amount of hype in mainstream media)

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#53

Post by sanderjd »

janalsncm wrote: post #46
sanderjd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would submit that we don't yet have enough evidence to say whether the comparison is apt or inapt. I personally think what's going on with these "generative" models seems like a bigger deal than blockchain, but it's fiendishly difficult to know what is or isn't hype while embedded within a hype cycle.

Seriously? The only comparison you can make is that both were hyped. Digging even a millimeter under the surface reveals they’re completely different. Blockchain was and still is rife with scams and “you just don’t understand the technology bro” hype men. Just check out Dirty Bubble Media. Blockchain was rarely if ever a product that solved a problem, the whole point is The Line Goes Up. That’s why no one uses blockc…

Again, I do tend to agree that there is a lot more "there" there with generative AI. But I think it's also true that it's too early to be sure.

You're comparing the two technologies at totally different points in their hype cycles. The comparison point to where AI is right now is to Bitcoin / very early Ethereum in the late 2000s to early 2010s. Nobody knew where it was all going, some people saw endless potential, other people saw nonsense and scams. The explosion of bitcoin into mainstream consciousness in the early 2010s is akin to the explosion of ChatGPT over the past 6 to 9 months.

But what's next? That's what matters. The early 2010s bitcoin boom now pretty clearly looks like a fad, in hindsight. Was ChatGPT also mostly a fad, or is it going to be a lasting fixture of productivity and/or entertainment moving forward? I think it's the latter - it has already changed my habits at work in ways that I think will be permanent - but I just think it's too early to say for sure.

(And to be clear, I'm not talking about machine learning as an academic discipline; I totally agree with you that there is definitely enough evidence to say there is a lot more "there" there than research into chained hashing to solve double-spend-like problems.)

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#54

Post by m3kw9 »

AI engineer is a hype term for someone that can incorporate LLM to solve an engineering problem. It isn’t that hard to use OpenAI apis, LLM are like super abstractions. You tell it in natural language, as opposed to a specific programming language. It’s still a very narrow field. The hype is real but it’s getting a bit frothy

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#55

Post by swyx »

sanderjd wrote: post #41
Der_Einzige wrote: post #8

If 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), whe…

I'm someone who would like to get "really good really fast", but have found that the on-ramps remain pretty weak. For instance, I have yet to find a good book on the subject. There are a ton of tutorials and articles, but it's maddening to try to cobble together any depth of understanding from those little nuggets. And there are tons of good papers on how the systems actually work, but these are not very useful for p…

we haven't launched it widely yet but if you peek at the top level nav you'll find the course we are working on :) https://www.latent.space/s/university

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#56

Post by janalsncm »

wpietri wrote: post #43
minimaxir wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, web3 bros pivoted to AI, which just adds even more noise to the space.

For me that's absolutely the strongest ground for comparison. In recent decades, we've had two big waves of tech advance: the Web and mobile. A lot of people have lived through them both, giving them an expectation that another such wave should be along soon. You could see that in the decade of blockchain/ICO/DAO/NFT/web3 hype, where people, many with shaky credentials, touted the transformation soon to come, taking…

Fraudsters will do what fraudsters do. If it wasn’t crypto it would be scamming retirees or hoarding PS5s. They’re a largely insignificant part of the economy. At a macro scale private capital has a much larger impact.

The issue is there’s a lot of dumb VC money floating around looking for a quick billion instead of investing long term fundamental research (boring!) that may produce results later on. It’s a fundamental issue with the economy because what Capital wants is not to do what’s best for humanity or even to build a sustainable widget factory. Capital wants a money printer. It’s a big inefficiency in the economy because ideally they’d prefer sustainable growth instead of 1000x unicorns.

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#57

Post by swyx »

cj wrote: post #52
swyx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(author here) There are at least 4 killer apps ($100m/yr revenue potential) so far: 1. Generative Text for writing - Jasper AI going 0 to $75m ARR in 2 years 2. Generative Art for non-artists - Midjourney has by some accounts $80m ARR 3. Copilot for knowledge workers - GitHub’s Copilot has roughly 50-80m ARR as well 4. Conversational AI UX - ChatGPT probably has >$100m ARR by now, Bing Chat has brought $m's worth of…

> what else do you need to see to believe? (geniune question) It's not that I don't believe in LLMs. It's that the level of media attention AI is getting isn't backed by the same level of real world use cases, yet. (All of the use cases you listed are awesome, no denying that, but I don't think those alone justify the amount of hype in mainstream media)

i mean, theres nothing i can do about mainstream media hype, but i guess my main point is this is a growing field with real money and utility behind it, and so will professionalize. if I am correct on that then AI Engineer will be a thing (because it is Least Bad title for the thing)

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#58

Post by moffkalast »

swyx wrote: post #45
cj wrote: post #14

I 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.wiki…

(author here) There are at least 4 killer apps ($100m/yr revenue potential) so far: 1. Generative Text for writing - Jasper AI going 0 to $75m ARR in 2 years 2. Generative Art for non-artists - Midjourney has by some accounts $80m ARR 3. Copilot for knowledge workers - GitHub’s Copilot has roughly 50-80m ARR as well 4. Conversational AI UX - ChatGPT probably has >$100m ARR by now, Bing Chat has brought $m's worth of…

The tech problems will eventually get sorted out I'm sure, the most uncertain problems are legal. The world's copyright law is not even up to date enough to deal with the internet without crappy patchwork workarounds (like Youtube's contentID nonsense), much less LLMs.

Steam just banned AI art and text assets and built in generators because they don't want the liability of hosting it. Midjourney is getting sued by Getty, Copilot breaks GPL licenses and was even facing class action lawsuits, OpenAI trained using copyrighted and even pirated content, LLama models are unavailable for commercial use, AGI alarmists want to ban the whole thing altogether, etc.

A lot of end usage depends on how all of this plays out in courts over the next few years. Why would people dump capital into something that will be declared illegal?

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#59

Post by janalsncm »

sanderjd wrote: post #53
janalsncm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? The only comparison you can make is that both were hyped. Digging even a millimeter under the surface reveals they’re completely different. Blockchain was and still is rife with scams and “you just don’t understand the technology bro” hype men. Just check out Dirty Bubble Media. Blockchain was rarely if ever a product that solved a problem, the whole point is The Line Goes Up. That’s why no one uses blockc…

Again, I do tend to agree that there is a lot more "there" there with generative AI. But I think it's also true that it's too early to be sure. You're comparing the two technologies at totally different points in their hype cycles. The comparison point to where AI is right now is to Bitcoin / very early Ethereum in the late 2000s to early 2010s. Nobody knew where it was all going, some people saw endless potential, o…

Well if you narrowly define AI to be ChatGPT and other generative LLMs, I think I agree so some extent. Unlike blockchain they do have use cases but it remains to be seen if those use cases can justify the money being thrown at them. How much is code completion really worth?

However, I disagree insofar as the outcome truly depends on an unknown technology. Blockchain was never going to revolutionize finance or any of its other grand claims. At best (and that’s if it worked), it would be a new database type that all of the existing financial systems would plug into. It was a libertarian pipe dream, naive about how the world actually works.

For any AI application, the world is different. If we simply replace AI with “automated system” we can see why. Pretty much every company would like to replace their workers with machines. And maybe machines can do things that humans would never be able to do (for example, search the entire internet for a very specific topic).

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#60

Post by __rito__ »

> "the fundamental gatekeeping that still persists in the market"

This person just called me a gatekeeper when just our definitions of what an AI Engineer is different... all while discussing the ambiguities of the term "AI Engineer".

Well, that's the internet for you!

My intentions were never of gatekeeping, our definitions of the term are wildly different. I laid the beginning part of a roadmap for a person who wants to solve problems that exist in the real world with Deep Learning- by choosing how to structure data, training models with existing architectures (and optimizers, loss functions, activation functions, and so on) and creating new ones from scratch- and to deploy them to solve the problem in the physical space.

Although, I have not spent hours on what the term "AI Engineer" should mean, it is not prompt engineering to me. If there is a consensus in future on the term meaning prompt engineering, then I will not give any advice on that, because I don't know much. Neither will I fight the definition.

My definition, still is the person who develops new kinds of microwaves as opposed to the author's whose definition is that of a cook who uses the microwave, by creating new recipes and dishes. That's fine, but didn't liked being called a gatekeeper.

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