The Wall Street Journal’s Post

Transcript

The artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence job artificial intelligence All that generative AI you keep hearing about is fueling a brand new job market. I wanted to look at one of those jobs in particular. Job title prompt engineer responsibilities writing text commands or prompts to get the best answers out of a generative AI large language model like Chachi BT pay up to $250,000 a year. Yes, prompt engineering is a totally new type of job because, well, large language models or LM's like Chachi PT 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. 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. There's the persona or role prompt. For instance, act as an assistant helping a financial analyst. You're instructing the LM 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. So what did I learn today? 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 and be better prepared for the new employment landscape, even if your next job title isn't officially prompt engineer.