Recently, Forbes published some information that seems highly shocking as it shows that in the present scenario, AI prompt Engineers can make as much as $300,000 a year, which is an insane salary. It seems like AI hype is already at full speed and shows no signs of slowing down. Google Bard Cloud 2, chatGPT, and many other AI chatbots offer a huge potential for us developers which means that software Engineers who know how to work with AI are in growing demand. So, in this blog we're going to discuss prompt engineering, what prompt engineers do, why this job pays so much, what's the difference between a prompt engineer and an AI engineer, what skills are required to this position, upsides, and downsides.
What is Prompt Engineering?
Prompt Engineering is a fairly new concept. In simple words, it's about figuring out what text queries to send to an AI to get the best results. These queries become prompts that other humans can use. The experts who do this process are prompt Engineers and it's they who create problems or queries designed to make a neural network produce a logical result. The AI takes into account the context of previous queries and answers and this makes it look like a piece of new information. Here is a quick example: let's say you have a highly intelligent robot that knows answers to any question you might ask it. However, its replies aren't always correct, and when you ask your robot a question it sometimes offers an answer that's completely off and that's the moment when Prompt Engineers come to the rescue. They give this robot precise instructions to make it offer the best possible answer. In other words, Prompt Engineers are experts in querying AI models and chatbots. especially those running on large language models (LLM).
Prompt Engineers come from diverse education fields. It could be philosophy, history, or English studies. This role demands linguistic Innovations and the translation of intricate ideas into precise prompts so you don't necessarily have to come from a Tech background to be a prompt engineer but having a computer science degree will be a plus.
Difference between a Prompt Engineer and AI Engineer?
Are AI engineers and Prompt Engineers the same thing? many people think it's the same but it's not. AI engineer is a professional developer who trains and Implements AI models to solve various problems in various Fields. Artificial intelligence Engineers use AI and machine learning, neural networks, computer vision, and natural language processing. So, they are programmers who specialize in these fields and nothing more. So their job is to create intelligent systems capable of analyzing data, recognizing images, generating texts, controlling robots, and so on.
That's why prompt Engineers are basically AI operators. They interact with it by providing AI with input data and forming a query in a way that allows them to get a quality final result. On the one hand, AI Engineers require strong coding and software development skills. On the other hand, if you are a prompt engineer you don't need to be a super tech expert. Of course technical skills are required but not at a super high level, this is good news if you want to become a prompt engineer.
Skills needed to become a Prompt Engineer:
So, the main problem with becoming a prompt engineer is that this profession is relatively new. there are almost no schools and very few courses that can teach you prompt engineering today. It means that you will likely struggle to find the necessary information or just a mentor and to become a prompt engineer, your main goal will be figuring out how to generate prompts that help language models generate meaningful answers. In terms of soft skills, you will need to be able to quickly grasp complex and familiar topics, have strong fact-checking skills be capable of critical thinking, and have strong writing editing, and communication skills. When it comes to hard skills it gets a bit more complicated here are some things you will need to know to learn how when which models work, and learn how to properly interact with chatbots, understand the basics of programming, machine learning, and AI, and actually know how all this stuff works in practice.
Just to give you an example, when checking through some jobs related to Prompt engineering, it comes with a list of requirements where we can see points like previous experience with prompt engineering, a degree in computer science, and linguistic understanding of large language models, strong communication skills and problem-solving skills, etc.
Of course, as you can see the requirements again include previous experience with prompt engineering, strong communication skills, problem-solving and puzzle-solving skills, creative thinking, and many other points. So, to sum up, to become a prompt engineer you first of all have to figure out how to generate prompts that help language models like GPT generate meaningful answers and become better and smarter.
Demand for prompt engineers and salaries
Many major companies already show an active interest in experienced Prompt Engineer Specialists. For example, Microsoft is developing the Microsoft Front engine: an open-source tool to help you write code to work with generative AI. That's why they are actively training and hiring Engineers regularly. Today, thousands of startups worldwide are working with AI and the majority of them require prompt engineering. If you are interested in learning about neural networks or you are a professional in a particular field you can try your hand at prompt engineering by using your experience to compose perfect prompts in the future and you will probably be able to develop prompts for specific fields and companies.
Okay, that's all great but what about salaries? If you are someone who is considering becoming a prompt engineer, this might be a great motivation to start now because experienced professionals can earn over $300K annually today. However, you must understand that it will take time and a lot of hard work to get to that level. The reality is three hundred thousand salary is something companies pay advanced professionals with solid experience in the field and such offers require five to six years of experience. So, entry-level Specialists will get half of that or even less money.
Some Upsides of Prompt Engineering
Like any other area, Prompt Engineering has its pros and cons. Now, let's talk about things that make it great:
- Groundbreaking Technology: Prompt engineering today is a very Innovative technology. It's driving advancements in natural language processing, deep learning, and neural networks and if you're a prompt engineer you will see it evolve in real-time and you will be part of every groundbreaking discovery in this sphere.
- Impactful Contribution: Today, Prompt engineers get the chance to affect multiple Industries or probably almost all of them. By teaching AI to deliver correct and meaningful answers, they can significantly improve AI user experience or insane efficiency in numerous sectors.
- Valuable Skills: Today, the skills that prompt Engineers to scale are really valuable. The expertise in natural language processing, machine learning, and AI model development brings prompt Engineers to demand in different areas like research, development, Consulting, medicine, and so on.
- Opportunities and Attractive salaries: As I said earlier, prompt engineering is signing high demand and this means High salaries and high job opportunities.
Downsides
So, as we just discussed some of the advantages, let's go through some of the things about Prompt Engineering that might surprise/disappoint you:
- Complexity: First of all, prompt engineering is not an easy field. As a Specialist, you will have to deal with lots of complex concepts, AI models, algorithms, and a great amount of data to process making it extremely challenging. All this takes a lot of time energy and deep technical expertise.
- Data Limitations: The data prompts engineers have to deal with will not always be complete, accurate, or easily accessible, so you will always have to check information and make it high quality. You will have to constantly work on improving your skills and there will be no end to learning. These guys require high dedication and commitment on an ongoing basis. that's why that's not for everybody.
- Ongoing Technological Changes: All things AI-related transform and evolve at an insane speed. Today, it gets even crazier because algorithms and tools are changing and competition is growing daily. that's why prompt Engineers must keep up with these rapid changes, constantly learn and adapt.
So at last, after going through this blog, if you decided to learn prompt engineering Here are a few links to trusted resources so you can take a deep dive into it feel free to share your thoughts about prompt Engineering:
