Prompt Engineering is the Job of the Future ... Maybe

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👀 Today’s Thing: Prompt Engineering is the Job of the Future ... Maybe

🤖 Anthropic, a San Francisco-based AI research and safety company, made headlines with this help wanted ad. The role? Prompt Engineer and Librarian. The salary? Up to a cool $375,000. Yes, USD. Plus equity and benefits. Creative polymath and Hollywood star Donald Glover recently put out a call for Prompt Engineers to come work at his studio, as well.

📰 Want to go deeper? This piece delves into the whats, hows, and whys of The Art of Writing Text Prompts.

📖 Backstory

☞ Prompt engineering is the craft (art? science? discipline?) of creating instructions for an AI model to follow. The idea, of course, is to get good results back from the model. A good result could be a ready-to-publish blog post for your company blog, or it could be a never before seen approach to solving climate change and world hunger. The current hype cycle around prompt engineering revolves around crafting prompts for large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

☞ Equal parts programming, writing, and structured experimentation, prompt engineering is a rapidly evolving discipline. Sophia Yang, a data scientist who writes about the field, likened the process to coding:

☞ While big thinkers tend to agree that facility with AI tools like chatbots will be essential to most jobs in the future, opinion is divided on the future of the Prompt Engineer role. One school of thought sees the job as grift, or a way for a select few to cash in on the Gen AI wave before businesses catch up and expect every employee to do at least a little prompt engineering in the course of their daily work.

🔑 Keys to Understanding

🥇 Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the Internet has been flooded with prompts, prompt recipes, and guides to writing better prompts.

🥈 Websites like Learnprompting.org have sprung up, offering detailed courses in learning to engineer better prompts. AI learning site Deeplearning.ai, which was founded by AI pioneer Andrew NG recently teamed up with OpenAI to offer ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers, a short course co-taught by Ng himself.

🥉 Anthropic: “Large language models are a new type of intelligence, and the art of instructing them in a way that delivers the best results is still in its infancy — it’s a hybrid between programming, instructing, and teaching. You will figure out the best methods of prompting our AI to accomplish a wide range of tasks, then document these methods to build up a library of tools and a set of tutorials that allows others to learn prompt engineering, as well as work with high value partners to directly solve their challenges.”

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Until the next thing,

- Noah

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