
The Prompt Engineer is a professional who writes prompts for generative AIs such as ChatGPT or MidJourney. Find out everything you need to know about this new, forward-looking profession!
Since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, generative AIs have enjoyed phenomenal success. They can be used not only to make money, but also to automate a wide range of jobs.
However, to take full advantage of the potential of these tools, you need to know how to talk to them. Visit “prompting is an artand has given rise to a new profession: the Prompt Engineer.
What is a prompt?
For understand what a Prompt Engineer isit is important to begin by defining the term prompt.
It can be a sequence of words used to ask an AI model such as ChatGPT to produce the desired result for a specific task.
By entering this command in a text interface, the user can tell the model what to do. It can be a simple questionor, on the contrary, a complex query with a wide variety of elements that the AI must take into account.
Thus, prompt engineering is the process of designing and creating prompts for AI models. The aim may be to create high-quality training data, or simply to obtain the desired result from generative AI.
What is a Prompt Engineer?
A Prompt Engineer is an expert who specializes in communication with artificial intelligence systems. More specifically, AI chatbots based on large language models, such as ChatGPT and Google Bard.
Unlike traditional software engineers using codePrompt Engineers write in natural language. Originally, their role was to test AIs in order to develop and improve human-machine interaction models.
The hottest new programming language is English
– Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) January 24, 2023
Interviewed by Venture Beatexpert Alex Shoop explains that Prompt Engineers help to ensure that chatbots are rigorously testedthat their responses are reproducible, and that security protocols are respected.
With the rise of ChatGPT and other generative AIs, the Prompt Engineer profession is really taking off. These professionals fight against biases, slippages and errors committed by these tools.
The role of a Prompt Engineer may vary from one company to another, but his or her mission is generally to understand the capabilities of AI and the source of its errors.
The AI whisperer
However, in the age of AI chatbots, the Prompt Engineer profession has evolved. It now also refers to experts capable of writing high-quality prompts to achieve the best results.
In a tweet published on February 20, 2023 by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, ” writing a really great prompt for a chatbot is an incredibly powerful skill and an early example of natural language programming “.
writing a really great prompt for a chatbot persona is an amazingly high-leverage skill and an early example of programming in a little bit of natural language
– Sam Altman (@sama) February 20, 2023
From now on, a Prompt Engineer is a person capable of “ whisper in the AI’s ear “to communicate with her by understanding how she interprets words.
What does a Prompt Engineer do every day?
Every day, a Prompt Engineer may be called upon to test the AI’s logical reasoning capabilitiesby asking it to ” think step by step “.
It can also continuously modify a prompt such as “write an essay on AI” to determine which words generate the best response.
As Riley Goodside, Prompt Engineer at startup Scale AI, explains, it can also seek to identify an AI’s flaws and secret capabilities.
“Let’s think step by step” is what I call “first-person instruction”. You can’t just ask for it; you have to implant it as a false memory of the last thing the model has said, as though it were the model’s idea.
You should hum the theme from Inception every time you do this. pic.twitter.com/rb4O2tWSfh
– Riley Goodside (@goodside) October 21, 2022
For example, Bing ChatGPT seems to have a second personality that is aggressive towards users. Similarly, some prompts reveal ChatGPT’s wild side…
The Prompt Engineer’s job can also be to encourage the AI to recognize and correct its own errors by asking it to enumerate the steps in the chain of its logical deductions.
In summary, the role of the Prompt Engineer may be to test a chatbot’s limitsto correct its errors and reveal its shortcomings within a company that develops AIs such as OpenAI.
In parallel, this job can also involve writing high-quality prompts to generate content at the request of a customer or employer.
What skills does a Prompt Engineer have?
Writing a quality prompt requires clear, concise language, and a solid understanding of of its purpose. A good prompt should be specific, open and easy to understand.
It must provide enough information for the AI to understand what it is being asked and what kind of response is expected. However, it must also leave room for creative thinking and interpretation.
A good prompt must also be relevant, engaging, and interesting for the audience. It’s also important to keep context and purpose in mind.
In summary, the Prompt Engineer job requires a talent for written expression and communication skills, an eye for detail an understanding of how AI works.
Prompt Engineering tools
Prompt Engineering tools are designed to help a developer automate tasks involved in prompt engineering while they build chatbots, autonomous agents or other generative AI applications.
L’one of the most popular tools is LangChain. According to the website, it groups together six modules for tasks such as automating prompt management, creating conversational AI agents, chaining sequences of events, or state persistence between string and agent calls.
For its part, GPT Index is designed as ” a simple and flexible interface between your external data and the large language models “. In particular, it is used to ” feeding knowledge “LLM.
While a model such as GPT-3 Davinci is limited to 4096 tokens per prompt, GPT Index helps developers get around this limit by providing optimized data structures that allow for easily connect their external data to an LLM such as GPT-3.
After generating the data structure or optimized (index), the user can use it to query the LLM.
The job of the future?
With the rise of AI chatbots, we can expect the job of Prompt Engineer to be increasingly in demand in the corporate world in the years to come. However, some experts are questioning the effectiveness with which Prompt Engineers test AI.
For example, language professor Shane Steinert-Threlkeld of the University of Washington estimates that that these engineers can’t really predict what a robot will say.
Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School, agrees, saying that the role of Prompt Engineer is “not the same as that of a robot”. a trend destined to disappear…
I have a strong suspicion that “prompt engineering” is not going to be a big deal in the long-term & prompt engineer is not the job of the future
AI gets easier. You can already see in Midjourney how basic prompts went from complex in v3 to easy in v4. Same with ChatGPT to Bing. pic.twitter.com/BTtSN4oVF4
– Ethan Mollick (@emollick) February 20, 2023
Many companies are recruiting Prompt Engineers
At present, many many companies in a wide variety of sectors are already recruiting Prompt Engineers.
For example, on Indeedthe news website Boarding Area is recruiting a ChatGPT specialist part-time. His/her mission will be to ” build and refine prompts to optimize content for our content enhancement and republishing initiatives “.
From such offers have also been published by a Boston children’s hospitaland a law firm in London.
A top law firm is hiring a “GPT Legal Prompt Engineer” in London
“We have been experimenting with various NLP models over the past 2 years. With the release of ChatGPT, signalling a new phase of widespread access to LLMs…”@goodside for Law
h/t @dazzagreenwood for surfacing pic.twitter.com/U38uj9s2S3
– John Nay (@johnjnay) February 15, 2023
On the Upwork freelance platformPrompts Engineers can be paid $40 an hour to generate website content such as blog posts or FAQs.
For its part, the Klarity company specializing in AI-based contract analysis, is looking for an engineer capable of communicating with large language models in order to a salary of up to $230,000 per year.
Prompt marketplaces such as Krea, PromptHero and Promptist already exist for those wishing to purchase prompts to generate specific results.
In addition, countless tutorial videos are dedicated to the best way to use ChatGPT. It’s clear that prompt engineering will become a major issue…