Back in 2022, the term “Artificial Intelligence” became an increasingly ubiquitous part of various workforces. Several companies and businesses thrived under the influence of a newfound gem. There were definite predictions that many careers will suffer losses and at the most, go extinct. And the possibilities of generative AI creating jobs were too far-reaching to even bank on. Fast forward to 2023, and those far-reaching predictions are now a thing of the past or so it seems. As Artificial Intelligence is creating new windows of opportunities in the job market. One of those windows of opportunity is “Prompt Engineering“.
What a plot twist!. Every significant technological advancement presently or in the future does not entirely pose a threat to human employment as earlier predicted. Instead, it puts millions of people at an advantage because experts who can constructively interact with AI models close the gap between machines and human interaction.
A Brief Catch Up
A lot of people stumbling on the term for the first time, and learning of the staggering remunerations perplexingly ask “What is prompt engineering in GPT-3?.” The term is used to describe a concept of how AI chatbots that are created to understand and respond to human text/speech using language prediction models can deliver better output based on specific prompts. This new field of expertise is also called prompting.
Developing content that is comprehensible to humans has historically stood as a challenge for machines. Centuries worth of deep research by computer scientists and engineers have led us to believe that many of these machines could not learn the intricacies and fine distinctions of human language. GPT-3 has demolished this theory with its pre-trained language model that generates realistic human-like content.
There are obvious limitations, however. Third-generation Generative Pre-trained Transformer chatbots are just that, pre-trained. Suggesting that these bots rely only on training data rather than a memory bank that continuously retains information from every dialogue. Minimal input to the chatbots can generate copious amounts of output, with limited interpretations. And most often, these responses lack structure and can be biased.
Due to a lack of contextual understanding when generating these responses, human intelligence is required to produce desired responses. This is where Prompt Engineers come in.
What Does A Prompt Engineer Do?
Picture this, you get paid $335,000 a year to be good at Google search. It’s not the same context but visualize it nonetheless. Prompts are the way people interact with these AI chatbots anyway, so why not streamline operations with Prompt Engineering to enable industries to focus on other roles that require expertise and proficiency?.
When AI Engineers build AI systems and models, Prompt Engineers develop prompts that are used to train AI models. By using a written language that tells computers what to do, which is mostly human language. These AI prompts then generate precise text summarizations, programming codes, and even visual output.
Why prompt engineering is important
To understand Why prompt engineering is important, Generative AI models undergo a series of training stages to avoid bias. So Prompt Engineers write prompts bearing in mind an accurate output and If the output is flawed, the input is modified to produce better responses. Without this, these AI models will continue to create documents, articles, posts, images, codes, reports, and overall output based on non-specific keyword input. Which may very well be out-of-context and unsatisfying to the user.
The demand for Prompt Engineers is progressively increasing. Several companies are hiring Prompt Engineers to instruct machine learning models, identify glitches and streamline workflow. Online learning platforms like Udemy are also incorporating Prompt Engineering courses. It is unclear however if Prompt Engineering jobs are here to stay. A large influx of new tools to aid in crafting prompts, such as PromptLayer, PromptPerfect, PromptingGuide, etc. Online marketplaces for buying and selling prompts like PromptBase have equally emerged.
Will prompt engineering be a job that people commit to overtime?. As human labor gradually phases out with the dawn of disruptive technology, automated jobs will most likely usher us into uncharted territories. We hope Prompt Engineering is one of such unexplored terrains.