Is Prompt Engineering a Thing?

Question

I'm trying to research the subject but I don't see much evidence that companies are racing to hire prompt engineers. Matter of fact, I'm not entirely clear what prompt engineering entails. Words of wisdom from experts would be most welcome.

jstx1 · Accepted Answer

Two different questions.> Is Prompt Engineering a Thing?Yes, it's a dumb name for the skill of modifying your prompts and questions to the LLM in a way that produces better results than if you just asked for what you wanted plainly. As language models get better, this might become obsolete.> I'm trying to research the subject but I don't see much evidence that companies are racing to hire prompt engineers.Because it's not really a job. Think of it like using the Google search engine - being able to search well is something you can get better at but being a "Google search-er" isn't a career or a job you'll see openings for.

pawelduda · Answer

You'll be able to tell when leetprompt emerges with stories how someone failed interview at FAANG because interviewer found their prompt for perfect boiled egg gave answer off by 1 minuteOtherwise it'll be probably a nice-to-have skill on top

keiferski · Answer

In terms of a career, probably not. It will likely just be an added skill required by already-existing jobs. Lawyers will need to know how to use ChatGPT for legal purposes, etc.
Personally, I have experimented with customizing prompts for creating Anki cards, and I guess you could call this prompt engineering:
https://neurotechnicians.com/p/generative-ai-and-anki-part-1...

tikkun · Answer

In short, from a perspective of "can I train and get a job as a prompt engineer and just write great LLM prompts as a full time job" - no.
From the perspective of - is there a skill to writing prompts that get good results from LLMs - yes, definitely. Just that ~no companies are truly hiring for that as a full time role.
I wrote more on this a few weeks back here: https://llm-utils.org/How+to+become+a+prompt+engineer - but it basically says what I wrote above, just with some more details.

jytechdevops · Answer

I went to a hackathon where riley goodside gave an elaborate, hour-long presentation on his work at scale ai. There were about 500 people in the building. Of the 500, 499 of them didn't listen to a single thing. maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The CEO of the company also came out and said it didn't seem useful--paraphrasing his comment.

msoad · Answer

I personally don't think this can be a long lasting trade or profession if it is a thing as you question.Ideally the language models should understand a question that is not really well formed. Like how Google can understand the queries that lack a ton of context but can figure it out.

Is Prompt Engineering a Thing?

I'm trying to research the subject but I don't see much evidence that companies are racing to hire prompt engineers. Matter of fact, I'm not entirely clear what prompt engineering entails. Words of wisdom from experts would be most welcome.

You'll be able to tell when leetprompt emerges with stories how someone failed interview at FAANG because interviewer found their prompt for perfect boiled egg gave answer off by 1 minute
Otherwise it'll be probably a nice-to-have skill on top

I personally don't think this can be a long lasting trade or profession if it is a thing as you question.
Ideally the language models should understand a question that is not really well formed. Like how Google can understand the queries that lack a ton of context but can figure it out.