Name: Prompt Engineering: The Hot New AI Job That’s Paying Up to $250K
Uploaded: 2023-11-29T10:30:00Z
Duration: 4 min 59 s
Description: Prompt engineering—crafting the sharpest queries to get the best answers out of ChatGPT or another generative AI chatbot—is a new type of job. So what kinds of skills do you need to get hired? To find out, WSJ’s Joanna Stern applied to be one. Photo illustration: The Wall Street Journal

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Prompt engineering—crafting the sharpest queries to get the best answers out of ChatGPT or another generative AI chatbot—is a new type of job. So what kinds of skills do you need to get hired? To find out, WSJ’s Joanna Stern applied to be one. Photo illustration: The Wall Street Journal

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Prompt Engineering: The Hot New AI Job That’s Paying Up to $250K 

Artificial intelligence.

Jobs.

Artificial intelligence.

Job.

Artificial intelligence.

Joanna: You've heard the AI warnings.

Every technological revolution affects the job market.

AI could cost some humans their jobs in the near future.

But AI is also creating some new jobs, specifically one. So I decided to apply. Job title: prompt engineer. Responsibilities: writing text commands or prompts to get the best answers out of a generative AI large language model like ChatGPT. Pay: up to $250,000 a year. To figure out exactly what a prompt engineer does, I decided to apply to be one at Hebbia, a New York-based AI startup. Wish me luck. Hi

Swetha. Good to meet you.

Nice to meet.

Welcome to the office.

I have wanted to be a prompt engineer as long as I can remember. All right, fine, the company was in on this little experiment.

It's really interesting that you say that because the role actually didn't exist until maybe a year ago.

Joanna: Yes, prompt engineering is a totally new type of job because well, large language models or LLMs, like ChatGPT only hit the scene a year ago. And if you've used ChatGPT, prompt engineering is actually pretty easy to understand. You type in your prompt, instructing whatever you'd like the large language model to do. The model then returns an answer, but sometimes that answer is unwieldy or not what you wanted. The better the input, the better the output.

For really one of the first times ever, we've been able to expose a pretty complicated piece of technology to someone that doesn't know how to code, to someone that knows how to talk to these models in a highly instructive, highly clear way. And that person is the prompt engineer.

So really it's a translator.

That's exactly what it is. You're translating between the machine and the human.

Seems like something I could be pretty good at.

I think so too.

But what's a good prompt and how do you learn to write them? Well, I went back to school and by school, I mean a Coursera class. Look at that. 100 and 100.

Prompts aren't just a one-off that you give to the large language model.

In his six-week prompt engineering for ChatGPT class, Dr. Jules White, a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University teaches you how to structure sentences to get the desired output from the bot. You seem bored by this, Browser. There's the persona or role prompt. For instance, act as an assistant helping a financial analyst. You're instructing the LLM to take on a persona. There's the new information prompt. This is where you feed the model new data it might not know about. Say, here's the transcript from the Microsoft earnings call. Please summarize the mentions of Bing, and you get a summary. Hebbia's Matrix app actually does all of this. It allows financial institutions and other businesses to upload or access huge datasets, filings, earnings transcripts, calls. Then it uses AI to find answers so people don't have to manually go through it all. And that's what Swetha gave me as a prompt engineering assignment.

So in this case, let's say that you are doing an analysis on earnings calls for a public company.

I did a pretty good job at writing those prompts, but there was another part of the job I wasn't prepared for: coding. In some cases, a prompt engineer may have to code the queries into the tool itself so Hebbia's clients can use them with a single tap. It was about that time that I knew this probably wasn't my next job. Plus, I was a little worried about how long this job might be a job, which I decided to bring up in my interview with the CEO. Joanna. Nice to meet you. As these models get better, is prompt engineering gonna be necessary?

At the end of the day, you'll still need people to tell them explicit instructions. Even in programming where machines are perfect at understanding code, there's still a job for people to go back and forth.

So what did I learn today? Well, getting a job as a prompt engineer is harder than I thought. Still, anyone who wants to successfully work with AI tools and elicit the best answers from them really should learn some of these prompt writing skills, even if your next job title isn't officially prompt engineer. Joanna, enjoyed meeting you too. After some deliberation, we will not be continuing the hiring process here. Wishing you the best in your search. Yeah, rough.