Two years ago, prompt engineering was one of the buzziest jobs in tech, fetching salaries of up to $200,000 on the promise of becoming any company’s “AI Whisperer.”
Now, the role is basically obsolete thanks to the breakneck speed of AI development and companies’ own maturity in terms of understanding how to use the technology.
The concept of prompt engineers was to have an expert crafting the exact right inputs to generate the best responses out of large language models. But today, AI models are much better at intuiting user intent and they can ask follow-up questions when they’re unclear on it.
Also, companies say they are training a wide range of employees across functions on how best to prompt and use models, so there’s not much of a need for a single person to hold this expertise.
“Two years ago, everybody said, ‘Oh, I think prompt engineer is going to be the hot job.’” said Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at Work at Microsoft. “It’s not turning out to be true at all.”
As part of a recent survey commissioned by Microsoft, 31,000 workers across 31 countries were asked what new roles their companies were considering adding in the next 12 to 18 months. Prompt engineering was second from the bottom, Spataro said, while roles such as AI trainer, AI data specialist and AI security specialist topped the list.
Spataro said large language models have evolved to be more iterative, conversational and aware of context. Microsoft’s AI-powered research agent, for example, will ask follow-up questions, tell you when it doesn’t understand things and ask for feedback on the information it serves up, Spataro said. In other words, “You don’t have to have the perfect prompt.”
On job platform Indeed, the number of postings for prompt engineers is minimal, said Indeed’s VP of AI Hannah Calhoon. User searches on Indeed for the role surged from two searches per million total searches in the U.S. in January 2023, months after ChatGPT’s debut, to 144 per million in April 2023. They have since flatlined at about 20 to 30 searches per million, according to Indeed.
People were certainly interested in the role at the time, Calhoon said, but that interest hasn’t been matched by actual employer job postings.
“Maybe they talked about the value of prompt engineers, but they weren’t then actually hiring for that,” said Calhoon.
Squeezed by tight budgets and growing uncertainty with the economy, companies have been much more measured in their overall hiring in recent years. Companies such as insurer Nationwide, workwear brand Carhartt and insurance company New York Life all said they’ve never hired prompt engineers, but instead found that—to the extent better prompting skills are needed—it was an expertise that all existing employees could be trained on.
Nationwide, for example, has rolled out a companywide AI training program for all employees, with prompt engineering being one of the most popular courses within it, said Chief Technology Officer Jim Fowler.
“So whether you’re in finance, HR or legal, we see this becoming a capability within a job title, not a job title to itself,” he said.
Source – https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hottest-ai-job-of-2023-is-already-obsolete-1961b054