ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Prompt Engineering Jobs Are Just A Myth — They Aren’t Real
You’re just being spooned with the wrong information — ALL THIS TIME
I guess everyone is pretty aware of AI’s revolutionary advancement around the world
See this picture below. Can you recall anything?
Most of the people who keep an interest in tech can recognize this image
Yes, you’re right!
This is the same image that was posted by Anthropic for the job role of a prompt engineer and a librarian (Here’s the JD).
So, it was the beginning of summer when AI’s popularity was rising at a bullish speed in the market.
According to The Hindu," The demand for AI prompt engineering job roles remains robust but has evolved since the peak of AI hype a few months ago. During the hype, there was a surge in job postings 132% driven by heightened expectations and investments in AI technologies”.
Therefore, when this image came out, people became curious about it.
More than curious, they were shocked to witness the jaw-dropping salary of this new job role ranging from $170K-$350K, where it seemed like anyone with strong language skills could grab a spot as a prompt engineer.
After so many months, there’s still some noise in the tech community about prompt engineering, but many of us wonder if it’s really dead or not
Which is obviously not!
But I would like to add something more — It’s slowly fading away and losing its shine.
I had also discussed about the current scenario of prompt engineering in this article.
Because the reality that you’re going to know might not be as promising as we imagined.
Thus, by the end of this article, you will get to know that Prompt Engineering jobs are really a myth.
Let’s get started!
So, what’s Prompt engineering?
Well Prompt engineering is the process of crafting accurate terms as inputs (or prompts) in such a way that the model (AI) can properly understand the context of the request, which can help it to process the user’s desired output.
The methodology of prompt engineering looks like this –
Victor Sanh an AI researcher at Hugging Face says that LLMs were trained based on “RLHF” training (Reinforcement learning from human feedback) where they normally understand the instruction in plain English but most of the time, they also make mistakes while processing an output, therefore failing to generate a proper response is where the help or role of a prompt engineer comes in.
Actual job of a prompt engineer
While the term prompt engineering can be found buzzing on everybody’s lips
But do you really know what kind of work they do or what are their actual responsibilities?
Well, I googled about it a few days back.
I searched
“How it feels to work at a company being a prompt engineer’’?
Honestly, the results were filled with these “Over-hyped” articles, which you can see below.
All claiming “How to become a prompt engineer”, “n skills to master prompt engineering”.
I guess no one on the internet is interested in talking about what a prompt engineer does or what prompt engineering is.
The reality behind the demand for these jobs
As the search engine wall over full of overhyped content, I came across Quora, where honestly, true expertise speaks out, providing different perspectives.
Well, someone had asked this question —
“What is the value of being a prompt engineer? I possess comprehensive knowledge in this field. Can you provide an update on the current state of the job market for prompt engineers?”,
As Quora was listed on the top results, I clicked on it to see what people had answered to this question.
To be honest, this answer was sufficient to clear my doubts about the demand for prompt engineering jobs in the market.
These types of answers are rarely found, and they give us a bittersweet taste of truth.
The reason why the role of prompt engineering will slowly fade away
With the flow of time, we initially have come to know about many AI advancements this year.
With its increased application in many fields like workplaces, hospitals, content creation, etc, we can safely say the AI industry is growing very fast.
Also, with the release of GPT — 4 Turbo and DALL E3, it is now possible for the model to generate prompts on its own, thus simplifying the hurdle that users used to face while generating complex prompts to get the desired results.
According to The Hindu, “A recent research paper published by Google DeepMind scientists showed that LLMs themselves are better at creating prompts than humans because of their grasp over language, indicating that the role itself isn’t as unshakeable as was once thought’’.
So, what is the point here?
It’s simple, as time passes, the complexity of technology will also decrease as tech companies want to simplify tech for their users in order to achieve customer satisfaction.
Do we really need to learn coding to become prompt engineers?
Ummmm……,
let’s forget about this internet’s flood of hyped content for some time and focus on what’s important.
Prompt engineering, even if it is a lucrative job role, learning about it can be really helpful for you.
Yes, this time I’m telling you with experience.
From recent 2 to 3 weeks, I’ve been doing a prompt engineering course by Vanderbilt University on Coursera and I’m having fun learning about its different concepts.
One famous question that gets asked frequently is —
“Do we really have to learn coding to become a prompt engineer?”
Well technically, Prompt engineering doesn’t require coding skills.
Yes
It can be advantageous, but it’s not a necessary requirement.
But according to Matt Bell, a technical staff member at Anthropic suggested that.
a background in coding and machine learning — the process by which models are “trained” is going to be a big help for applicants.
“Having coding knowledge becomes useful when creating systematic evaluations of prompts, and helps with prompting for coding tasks,”
Knowing how to code can give an extra set of capabilities to an engineer like fine-tuning AI models, customizing prompts as well as manipulating data for prompt refinement.
Python, a popular programming language is used in this case.
Well, honestly, these wise words don’t come from my knowledge, I came to know about it from here.
Conclusion
Well, I will not put all the takeaways discussed in the article, I’ll just confess that we shouldn’t get carried away by any type of short-lived hype.
The truth is I had also been a part of this, I also used to congratulate myself for being able to craft complex prompts, so that I could also get a prompt engineering job.
In recent months, I was also excited about this topic like you.
But after doing careful research, I finally faced the reality and was able to keep myself informed.
Please note that I’m totally not blaming prompt engineering here, as there will be some scenarios or fields where this skill will be absolutely required, but in few or low scales, I guess.
And if you ask me whether to learn this skill or not —
it totally depends upon your actions.
So, next time before you jump into the trend, remember to analyse the flip side of every situation.
I would also like to recommend you these 2 stories cited below by Mark A. Herschberg and Devansh because honestly, I came to know about a lot of truth about prompt engineering jobs from these both pieces only and rest is my research.
It’s a mind-blowing informational article for those who have a keen interest in AI.
Be sure to check it out.
Are you learning Prompt Engineering after reading this article?
What are your Career plans?
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References 👇
