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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

#71

Post by ur-whale »

manquer wrote: post #60
ur-whale wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Disagree.

At this point, BTC is very much known for its extremely high volatility (source: look at the price history since inception).

There hasn't been a single year since it launched where it hasn't displayed outrageously wild swings: at this point, it's pretty clear that the wild volatility is an intrinsic attribute of this particular asset class.

Therefore: not a crash, just Bitcoin's business as usual.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#72

Post by antibasilisk »

voytec wrote: post #53
reducesuffering wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

'assistant regional manager'

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#73

Post by paxys »

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.

Just about as idiotic as calling someone who types some weird words on a screen a Software Engineer with a salary of 300k.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#74

Post by antibasilisk »

truculent wrote: post #3
spaced-out wrote: post #2

No coding required...yet. I've been playing around with generating stories with ChatGPT for a while and...English (or any natural language) is really bad at being specific. I've made progress by learning some specific words to describe the type of scene I want and how much of it I want ChatGPT to generate (such as a scene for just that evening verses a few paragraphs describing weeks of traveling). I've also started…

I’ve wondered if it would be helpful to teach the model a micro-DSL for the given task at hand, and use that for greater control and precision.

It's helpful for doing things like mathematical reasoning, since the LLM can't really do it directly. A DSL would allow you to offload that reasoning.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#75

Post by smcl »

ur-whale wrote: post #69
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 boomed, had billions sunk into it and has had multiple high profile implosions Same thing it's been doing every year since 2011. Yet BTC is still trading at 20k USD ... I'm not sure we have the same definition of the word "crash". But whatever floats your boat, man.

May your investment go To The Moon

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#76

Post by vba616 »

deeviant wrote: post #49
dijit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike that analogy greatly. Lawyers have a bad reputation, sure, but there’s a lot of education about the interpretation of our law and the absurdly large corpus of legal documentation that must be read in order to even become a lawyer is far and above anything you describe.

So you are presenting the fact that lawyers must digest an absurdly large corpus of legal documentation, but also maintaining that is something a human lawyer has some sort of advantage over a LLM?

A LLM is a generator of misinformation that is maximally difficult to distinguish from real information.

How do you use this as a lawyer?

I mean, as a stereotypical evil lawyer in a world of naïve people who don't learn from experience, you could maybe use it to win cases until you destroy the justice system.

But other than that...

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#77

Post by usea »

vba616 wrote: post #64
usea wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just software. It takes skill and labor to achieve the outputs you want. Is someone who uses photoshop all day not an artist? Or someone who writes text for a compiler not a programmer? You've got a huge blind spot if you think prompt engineer isn't already a thing.

>You've got a huge blind spot if you think prompt engineer isn't already a thing. It may be a "thing", because generating BS is a viable business model and ChatGPT makes it more efficient. ..but I submit as a working hypothesis, that it is completely impossible to gain knowledge you do not already possess from a language model, no matter how clever your prompting. I'm very interested in counter-examples, but I have s…

I don't really understand what you're saying. Clearly the results one produces with the software has value, but you say it's all "BS." Does that just mean you don't like it, or what? If someone asks me to produce some concept art for a project they've just started, and I write some prompts to produce that concept art, what is "BS" about the art I produced? What does gaining knowledge have to do with it?

Is Art Director just a "BS" job? I don't get it.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#78

Post by vba616 »

superdisk wrote: post #34
echelon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since the job doesn't require any skills Oh like hell it requires no skill. You tell me how you'll generate better photos, improve dialogue coherence across multiple speakers, and control camera direction and movement (something we're using LLMs for too as we experiment with special-purposed models). All of this is not known a priori, by the way. And I won't accept building a database or lookup table as an answer.…

I normally don't work for free, but just as a sample, here's one I've been crafting for a few weeks... Epic 4k HD photo, high res and epic, cool extra awesome photorealistic 5k or 6k, realistic, in the style of a really good photographer. Nah I'm just playing, your company looks pretty cool, I just think a dedicated job for coming up with prompts (which is only going to become easier anyway with better ways to contro…

That's not a real prompt. A real prompt would look more like this:

   At the top left of a 4k picture, place a dot with the RGB value of (0.5, 0.8, 
   0.2), where color components are expressed on a scale of 0-1 inclusive.

   Then, on the top line, second position from the left, place a 
   dot with the RGB value of (0.7, 0.3, 0.4).

   (approx. 8 million more to follow...)
I'm not kidding either. If there really is a real "prompt engineer" job, I am sure it's going to be like this, with a fig leaf of some sort. We saw how this worked during the brief period when everybody was doing a blockchain project. Oracle added blockchain features to their database. Now I'm sure they all have amnesia, but there are remnants.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#79

Post by eurasiantiger »

vba616 wrote: post #64
usea wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just software. It takes skill and labor to achieve the outputs you want. Is someone who uses photoshop all day not an artist? Or someone who writes text for a compiler not a programmer? You've got a huge blind spot if you think prompt engineer isn't already a thing.

>You've got a huge blind spot if you think prompt engineer isn't already a thing. It may be a "thing", because generating BS is a viable business model and ChatGPT makes it more efficient. ..but I submit as a working hypothesis, that it is completely impossible to gain knowledge you do not already possess from a language model, no matter how clever your prompting. I'm very interested in counter-examples, but I have s…

Synthetic knowledge is still novel knowledge if you haven’t put the pieces together before.

Re: Tech’s hottest new job: Prompt engineer

#80

Post by vba616 »

root_axis wrote: post #54
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.

>LLMs and cryptocurrency are two completely different technologies

As mind viruses operating on human brains, they do not seem completely different technologies.

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