How to Ask AI the Right Questions: The Art of the Prompt Engineer

Artificial intelligence is here to stay.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
26 April 2023 Wednesday 00:51
104 Reads
How to Ask AI the Right Questions: The Art of the Prompt Engineer

Artificial intelligence is here to stay. Or at least that's what the experts predict. These machines that promise to make our lives easier are causing changes in many sectors such as computing, design or writing. But one of its greatest impacts is being experienced by the labor market.

The rise of intelligence tools like ChatGPT or Dall-E has made new professions appear almost overnight. This is the case of prompt engineers or instruction engineers, professionals in charge of designing and adjusting text inputs for AI language models.

To understand what a request engineer does, the first thing we must understand is that tools like ChatGPT work through large-scale language models, or LLMs, for its acronym in English.

“Large-scale language models are a type of generative AI specialized in understanding and generating natural language. LLMs can be considered as natural language machines, trained in natural language with instructions that are capable of extracting the knowledge they contain”, explains Luis Herrera, Solution Architect at Databricks.

The machines are trained to offer us an answer but this process is not so simple. They don't always give us the answer we want. So the important thing is to ask the right question. “This is where instructional engineers, who specialize in designing efficient instructions and questions that guide LLMs in generating meaningful and coherent answers, come in,” Herrera says.

These efficient questions are known as prompts, hence the name of this new profession. In the end, the prompt engineer is a kind of translator between human language and the language of artificial intelligence.

The rise of generative artificial intelligence is transforming the job market, creating highly lucrative opportunities for these new professionals. “These newly created roles are not only in high demand, but also offer impressive earning potential. Bloomberg recently echoed a headline for a job offer for an instructional engineer with a salary of $335,000, noting that it was not necessary to have a computer science engineering degree among the requirements,” says Herrera.

As these technologies continue to evolve, the importance of human expertise in guiding and refining AI models will only grow. But will these professions last over time? “The hectic pace of releases and discoveries in generative AI leads some to believe that the profession of prompting engineer may be the most ephemeral of humanity,” explains the expert.

Even so, Herrera believes that the sector will continue to demand these and other new professionals: “The employment outlook promises a future full of opportunities for those who are willing to enter this exciting field. Instructional engineers are just the tip of the iceberg and we will surely see more professions emerging as the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence continues in all areas of daily life and business.”

There are many courses, master's degrees and degrees aimed at training in the much-demanded artificial intelligence. Among them we highlight the Master in Artificial Intelligence from IMF Smart Education, where you approach the subject not only from a theoretical point of view but also from a practical one, incorporating what you have learned into social and business reality, creating innovative processes and solutions.

The Master in artificial intelligence and deep learning, taught by Inesem Business School, you will learn to manage, program and parameterize advanced machine learning tools for the creation of intelligent software. In CEMP's Master's in Artificial Intelligence Applications in Health you will achieve a broad vision of the technical, regulatory, economic and ethical aspects necessary to develop AI projects in the health sector.

Another option is the Master in Industry 4.0 and Artificial Intelligence, taught by IEBS. With this training you will learn to analyze and apply all technologies related to new production processes and especially artificial intelligence, with the aim of developing new advanced industrial processes.