The IT revolution has transformed our understanding of in-demand professions, even creating new ones. The profession of a prompt engineer is indeed a new phenomenon, making it quite promising and sought-after today. What makes this profession particularly attractive is its accessibility to everyone, including those from a humanities background, despite being directly related to IT.
What is a Prompt Engineer
A prompt engineer is a profession that involves working with AI, specifically, training language models. Predominantly, this refers to training GPT-3 or GPT-4 models (users might be familiar with this through using ChatGPT). We are keeping pace, so specialists are also needed in Yandex to train Alice.
The Tasks of a Prompt Engineer Include:
- Developing prompts. That is, textual instructions (hints) for the language model. This is an important part of the job, as the response fully depends on the accuracy and completeness of the queries.
- Optimizing language models – with special methods and tools.
- Identifying patterns in the responses of the language model, trends. Analytical methods and tools are used for this. Why? To develop more effective prompts.
- Training language models on new data, analyzing their performance.
- Collaborating with other specialists in the integration of AI into applications and systems.
Indeed, a bit of knowledge in programming is necessary for such work. You will have to work with datasets, adjust artificial intelligence parameters, and interact with programmers (for which understanding their language is crucial). However, this is still accessible to people even without a technical education.
Popularity of the Profession
Currently, the demand for prompt engineers is high because language models have suddenly gained immense popularity. But there’s still a long way to go. They need to learn and learn. Accordingly, “teachers” are needed. And with neural networks, the more teachers, the better. So, if you’re considering switching professions and are drawn to IT – seize the moment.
Predominantly, the prompt engineer profession is in demand in overseas companies, offering the highest salaries. But if you’re aiming for cooperation with Anthropic with a salary of $335,000 per year, you must be proficient in the architecture of language models, be able to program in Python, stay updated with AI news, have at least 5 years of development experience. And, of course, know English.
Other companies and organizations offer a more modest income, up to $100,000 per year, but they have fewer requirements for candidates.
What can a future neural network training specialist expect in Russia? There are not many vacancies yet, but they exist, including for remote employees who will work online. Salaries are not the highest but cannot be called low either – ranging from 30,000 to 70,000 rubles per month. And here too, it all depends on your skills and experience.
How to Become One
Who is this, a prompt engineer for a neural network – it’s a new profession but accessible to many. And this makes the specialization even more attractive.
There’s no shortage of training - special online courses are available where you will receive basic knowledge of working with neural networks. However, if you’re aiming for a career in this field, make an effort to learn (after all):
- Python. It’s necessary to know at least the basics to work successfully with datasets.
- NLP and ML concepts (natural language processing and machine learning). This is needed for preprocessing texts, training, and optimizing neural networks, developing their new features. During your training, you will learn to work with concepts, but it’s something that you need to improve on your own.
- Prompt development. More practice – more experience.
- Big data technologies. This includes MongoDB, Hadoop, Apache Kafka, etc. Again, besides training courses, extensive independent work is needed.
- Yes, it’s a bit more complex than it seemed at first. But not as hard as programming. So if you’re eager to master a new direction – go for it, prompt engineering is promising. A true profession of the future.
Prompt Engineer Career Training Course
So, we’re telling you how to become a promising prompt engineer. First and foremost, you need to get familiar with the specifics of the profession – maybe it won’t suit you. But if you’re exploring the features and requirements thinking, “yes, I want this,” it’s time to find a suitable online course.
There are plenty of them, and your task is to choose a course with a program and schedule that suit you.
Conclusion
Prompt engineer – a new but promising profession that emerged due to the development of neural networks. And through it, neural networks will become even smarter. To master the specialty, you need to complete a training course for a prompt engineer, but the outcome also depends on personal efforts – you need to learn quite a bit additionally.
