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Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#51

Post by notpachet »

This 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.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#53

Post by voytec »

reducesuffering wrote: post #23
superdisk wrote: post #8

I 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.

Welcome to the last decade of title inflation. Everyone is a "manager" now. A "marketing manager", "product manager", "account manager". No more secretary, it's "executive assistant". It's a perk a company can offer, conferring higher status, at no expense to themselves. So the equilibrium is for other companies to do the same, otherwise the company that gives this cost-free perk outcompetes for talent. People are gr…

Related: Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake "manager" titles[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34641549

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/salary-manager-jobs-fake-titles...

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#54

Post by root_axis »

smcl wrote: post #19

Weird how ChatGPT popped up as a newly hyped Next Big Thing just as crypto crashed. Probably not worth thinking about.

The connection is purely superficial, LLMs and cryptocurrency are two completely different technologies, hype is always going to exist with every popular technology, we need to be able to look at something and evaluate it on its own merit rather than as a function of how popular it is.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#55

Post by neilv »

Early 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.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#56

Post by jareklupinski »

xoac wrote: post #44
tanto wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The naming might be flawed but it's like a batista I guess. You can spend a lot of money on the machine but without an expert to use it you will not get the best out of it.

Yes but you can teach most of what there is to know in a couple of weeks tops. You don't call baristas Coffee Engineers.

starbucks takes notes furiously

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#57

Post by travisjungroth »

notpachet wrote: post #51

This 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…

SEO 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.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#58

Post by p1esk »

dmonitor wrote: post #42
tanto wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The naming might be flawed but it's like a batista I guess. You can spend a lot of money on the machine but without an expert to use it you will not get the best out of it.

Just train an LLM on LLM prompts and automate the prompt engineer process.

And how do you get this LLM to output a good prompt?

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#59

Post by smcl »

arthurcolle wrote: post #38
smcl wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto boomed, had billions sunk into it and has had multiple high profile implosions. Yes it has absolutely crashed.

Crypto market cap is still around ~1T USD

If you want to be part of it do not let me stop you.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#60

Post by manquer »

ur-whale wrote: post #22
smcl wrote: post #19

Weird how ChatGPT popped up as a newly hyped Next Big Thing just as crypto crashed. Probably not worth thinking about.

> 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.

Crashes don’t mean terminal.

If the dollar (or any other currency)lost 70% of its value in less than a year then we would certainly say it crashed

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