Scale.ai has recently made a significant hire by onboarding a prominent Prompt Engineer. This move has established a market rate of $250k to $335k and equity for similar roles, requiring only fundamental coding skills.

Anthropic AI has also followed suit in setting this standard.

In fact, the CEO of OpenAI and developer of ChatGPT, Sam Altman, spoke about the need for prompt engineers:

With the world being more reliant on AI, jobs that never existed are in the picture now. Among these, Prompt Engineering is stealing the limelight.

Who exactly is a Prompt Engineer?

In layman’s terms, a Prompt Engineer creates prompts for AI systems like OpenAI’s GPT-3 or GPT-4. These prompts help AI models understand what humans are asking for and generate relevant responses.

The job title might be new, but the concept of prompts has been around. But the rapid advances in AI technology, particularly in natural language processing, have made prompts more complex and sophisticated.

This created a new demand for professionals who can write high-quality prompts that help AI systems produce more accurate and meaningful responses.

Prompt engineering requires a blend of technical and creative skills. Not only do engineers need to understand AI and natural language processing deeply, but also they should be able to write an engaging language for humans, yet specific enough to provide clear instructions to the AI system.

Yep, that’s not easy.

How do we learn this skill?

While some skills can be learned through formal education, many Prompt Engineers are self-taught. There are several online communities, like the Prompt Engineering Guild, where people can learn from each other and share best practices.

Or you can always enroll in courses from sites like Udemy, Coursera, or Skillshare.

We know AI is transforming the way we work.

From chatbots to virtual assistants, AI is omnipresent. As these systems become more sophisticated, they require better prompts to produce even better outputs.

The result? The demand for Prompt Engineers grows (read: is already growing) rapidly. OpenAI and Google are already hiring Prompt Engineers, and more are likely to follow suit.

According to Glassdoor, the average salary for a Prompt Engineer in the United States is around $115,000 annually.

The job offers excellent pay and benefits, but it has its challenges:

• As AI systems advance (which they will), they may require complex prompts that are harder to create. This calls for you to be a pro!

• There is a risk of bias in the prompts, leading to biased responses from AI systems. Being mindful and creating fair and unbiased prompts will be a tough nut to crack.

That being said, Prompt Engineer is surely an exciting career, considering how fast the AI world changes, presenting you with new challenges almost daily.

If not as a career, learning basic prompt engineering will take you a long way in leveraging AI. Don’t sleep on it.