Re:Ask HN: Is Prompt Engineering a Thing?
by goodside on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:08PM
(#36975563)
I’m a Staff Prompt Engineer @ Scale
Is PE a fast-growing career: Not really. Lots of developers are writing prompts, very few doing it full time or making it their job title. I do like Kaparthy’s suggestion for “AI Engineer” to describe the growing ecosystem of engineering around LLMs though — the name of that activity isn’t settled yet but it’s many people’s full time jobs in practice. PE is probably the closest fit right now.
Most of the full-time PEs I can think of work for the LLM vendors themselves. In that environment it’s a mix API evangelism/docs, developing prompts/training for high-value customers, or in some cases helping ML teams maintain large prompt/completion corpora for tuning (a “prompt librarian”).
I work for Scale who provides labeling and RLHF data to LLM vendors. My job is a mix of the above, particularly the prompt librarian aspect but with a focus on adversarial testing and red teaming. I used to write more prompts for customers but since ChatGPT LLMs are easier to use and devs can mostly figure things out on their own.
Is PE a fast-growing career: Not really. Lots of developers are writing prompts, very few doing it full time or making it their job title. I do like Kaparthy’s suggestion for “AI Engineer” to describe the growing ecosystem of engineering around LLMs though — the name of that activity isn’t settled yet but it’s many people’s full time jobs in practice. PE is probably the closest fit right now.
Most of the full-time PEs I can think of work for the LLM vendors themselves. In that environment it’s a mix API evangelism/docs, developing prompts/training for high-value customers, or in some cases helping ML teams maintain large prompt/completion corpora for tuning (a “prompt librarian”).
I work for Scale who provides labeling and RLHF data to LLM vendors. My job is a mix of the above, particularly the prompt librarian aspect but with a focus on adversarial testing and red teaming. I used to write more prompts for customers but since ChatGPT LLMs are easier to use and devs can mostly figure things out on their own.