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The Rise of the AI Engineer

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Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#61

Post by moffkalast »

richardw wrote: post #22
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…

I’ve been thinking the leading edge is already in the trough of disillusionment! At least on HN etc. We see lots of reports of limitations on HN. Those in the know don’t trust it nearly as much as the public and all the CEO’s of businesses drooling to install AI and have the money go up. Going to have to dig our way through those issues to get real value.

Well you have to consider the inherent bias on HN, in that the trough of disillusionment is HN's default state of mind regarding literally every topic. It's really rare to see a thread where most of the comments aren't negative.

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#62

Post by buffalobuffalo »

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…

I'm also a skeptic, but for a slightly different reason. There are currently two types of business use cases that seem to be the focal point of this generation of AI.

1) Tooling. This one I think will probably bear fruit. It will likely result in huge productivity gains (I mean, it already has for me). But i don't know if it will result in a paradigm shift.

2) Agents. This is where most of the hype is focused. The idea is that you can cut humans out of the loop. If doable, this would be revolutionary. But from what I've seen, the currently technology is not likely to do this. The reason is that agents that are required to perform a long series of independent actions without human intervention can fall victim to an accumulation of small errors that occur in each step. This kind of "snowball effect" will often result in complete garbage being produced.

As a result of point two, I think a lot of the new AI products are likely to fall flat. And as this happens, the hype/funding will dry up pretty quickly. All the same, I think this will have more positive economic outcome than all the crypto stuff did.

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#63

Post by skepticATX »

swyx wrote: post #57
cj wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

AI Engineers are just software engineers who use specific tools. If we want to use a fancy title then that's fine, I guess. But let's not pretend that a typical dev can't easily learn vector DBs, data pre-processing, fine tuning, etc.

None of these things require specialized knowledge in the way that say being an AI researcher would.

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#64

Post by Xenoamorphous »

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…

I think comparing AI to blockchain is not fair.

Sure, it was a hyped technology a few years back, but only in tech environments.

My mom has never heard of blockchain, I bet. AI is in the mainstream media all the time.

But ultimately it's a matter of scope. AI has the potential of, at the very least, transforming lots of jobs. Blockchain never had that potential.

The company I work for, a non-tech one, never ever mentioned blockchain. But they're trying to get AI everywhere.

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#65

Post by onion2k »

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…

75+80+80+100 is £335m per year in revenue. For a point of comparison, that's approximately 11 hours of Google's revenue.

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#66

Post by charles_f »

There's a bit of snake oil in all of that.

By any means ML is a very specialized subfield, where you need solid math basis and a deep understanding of the science behind it all.

But I struggle to see the same thing for AI. If by "AI engineers" you mean someone who builds an LLM*, then it's very much just ML. If you mean someone who integrates with the LLM someone else built, then it's very much just backend work. Sure, you might need a few days to understand a few concepts, I've integrated with Paypal in the past and that doesn't make me a payment for engineer.

* wont even get into the argument of labelling LLMs with AI

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#67

Post by riku_iki »

onion2k wrote: post #65
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…

75+80+80+100 is £335m per year in revenue. For a point of comparison, that's approximately 11 hours of Google's revenue.

but rate of growth is likely 100-1000 times higher

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#68

Post by vjust »

recently saw a demo app built on top of GPT3. Used a rest API for prompts. The backend was hooked to a corpus of PDFs and a SQL Database with financial data.

What changed was the queries were English/natural language. The query language has changed. That's the R in CRUD. I wonder if the C, U, and D will also change.

While this is one of many types of AI, it means commands will be in natural English. This might be a big deal for UI builders because how we ask questions has changed to NL.

Re: The Rise of the AI Engineer

#70

Post by amelius »

rufius wrote: post #20

AI/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.

This stuff is going to be so vague that an AI will be able to do it.
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