How to learn Prompt Engineering in 2023?

Get ahead of the competition by exploring the exciting potential of prompt engineering in the booming AI industry.

FilmyFlix
8 min readApr 2, 2023
Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

After the release of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT on 30th November 2022, AI’s popularity and usage have become surprisingly popular in everybody’s life. Starting from various applications to talking with virtual assistants, different types of AI models had come into the market and thus helping the user in increasing their productivity.

Today when everybody is complaining about how AI is going to take away everybody’s jobs in the future, to defend it suddenly the term “PROMPT ENGINEERING” burst out somewhere and became very popular within a very short period.

I discussed GPT-4 in my previous article:

After reading numerous articles and doing deep research finally, I conclude that Prompt Engineering could be the next Job opportunity for us in the future which could be made possible with the help of AI only.

Therefore in this article, let’s discover more about prompt engineering by diving deep into it.

So, What’s Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering is the process of designing and developing prompts (also inputs) in natural languages, which are used to deeply train artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It is an important process included in the development of an AI system that helps to improve its learning skills and critical thinking capacity.

We have to know that the response or the output of an AI depends on the quality and nature of the input; it can be a text-to-text or text-to-image. The clearer the prompt, the better output will be processed and generated.

Need for prompt engineering

Prompts were usually provided to the AI systems or structures to teach them how to make proper predictions and outputs, mostly in the form of text or speech, it can also be an image sometimes. Some AI tools like Photosonic allow you to either create a text-to-image prompt or you can convert an image into another creative style.

Photosonic AI helps you to create thousands of realistic images from text (SOURCE : Bloggersgoto)

Prompts will help the AI to read and understand the input effectively and process the accurate output asked by the user. But poorly designed prompts can lead to inaccurate and incomplete data which might become a critical barrier in the further development of the AI model.

So again here prompt engineering becomes an essential part of the AI ecosystem as its overall performance depends upon the process of providing prompts to the AI.

Opportunities in prompt engineering

The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT is creating a need for “prompt engineers,” people who write questions and prose for AI chatbots to test and improve their answers. Some of these roles have salaries as high as $335,000 and don’t require degrees in tech- Business Insider

Prompt engineering is now on rapid fire, basically in the field of employment where everybody is searching for their dream job. Prompt engineering has the potential to become a dream job for everyone out there, providing plenty of opportunities for those who keep an interest in this area and have some expertise in it.

Development of conversational AI systems such as chatbots and virtual assistants is one of the main jobs here. This means prompt engineers must be experienced in designing and creating different types of prompts which would help the AI to answer accurately and nearly similarly to human language.

Job posting from Anthropic website (Source : LinkedIn)

Anthropic, an artificial intelligence safety and research company, currently has an open role for a “prompt engineer and librarian” with a salary range between $175,000 and $335,000, as first reported by Bloomberg.

The post says the role involves building “a library of high quality prompts or prompt chains to accomplish a variety of tasks, with an easy guide to help users search for the one that meets their needs,” and building “a set of tutorials and interactive tools that teach the art of prompt engineering to our customers.”

Sam Altman’s Tweet (Source : Twitter)

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has spoken about the need for prompt engineers. In February, he tweeted that “writing a really great prompt for a chatbot persona is an amazingly high-leverage skill.”

So if you are searching for a job that provides both growth and development in your working career then you can consider Prompt engineering as the right choice.

Challenges

Photo by Olav Ahrens Røtne on Unsplash

Despite various opportunities, there are a significant number of challenges in prompt engineering. One of those main challenges to be addressed is facing difficulty in creating clear and accurate data of prompts while training the AI and fetching the response which should be nearly similar and natural to human language

But we all know that human language is very complex and dynamic, it can become confusing and difficult for an AI to understand huge amounts of inputs or prompts together, as a result, it will fail to process it and will show an error.

The reason is, a single word can mean different meanings and it depends upon the context which is provided. So to receive a perfect response, prompt engineers must have a deep understanding of the structure of human language.

Another challenge to be included here is, it requires a large amount of high-quality training data because every AI system requires large amounts of data to learn effectively, otherwise, they will be like a hollow in a space. On the other hand, collecting and labeling a vast amount of data is expensive and time-consuming.

Therefore prompt engineers must find various ways to create prompts that can be trained on limited data sets and also must keep themselves up-to-date with this fast-evolving field of AI.

How to become a prompt engineer

Source : allabtai.com

To become a prompt engineer, an individual must possess the following necessary skills mentioned below

· Excellent writing and communication skills

Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash

It is the fundamental part of prompt engineering; you must be skilled enough to write clear and concise prompts which should be easy to understand by the AI models.

· Must Possess Technical Knowledge

Source : allabtai.com

Technical skill is the main criterion required in this field. Individuals who apply for the job must know about machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and how large language models work such as ChatGPT, and GPT-4. Programming skills are also required, you should know how to use python, C, and C++ type of programming languages.

· Creativity

Photo by Ameen Fahmy on Unsplash

Creativity is a crucial part of prompt engineering because developing creative prompts forces the AI to generate interesting and engaging outputs (text or image) rather than giving those basic prompts which provide short and unclear results.

· Testing and reporting errors

Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash

The work of prompt engineers is not only making eye-catchy prompts every time, but they should also evaluate and find errors in the AI models and then report them to their developers, so they can fix the error permanently.

At last, build a portfolio and start applying for jobs if you have the above-mentioned skills through which you can become a successful prompt engineer and can dedicate yourself to the AI community.

Future of Prompt Engineering

The future of prompt engineering is relatively promising but some academics, question — “how much the prompt engineering will be effective”?

Shane Stienert Threlkeld, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington evaluated that “prompt engineers can’t actually predict what the bots will say”. He further added that “it is not a science; it’s let’s poke the bear in different ways and see how it roars back.”

Ethan Mollick, a Wharton School professor who used to permit his students to use ChatGPT for classwork said that he thinks the role of a prompt engineer is a fad that will peter out.

Screenshot from Ethan Mollick’s tweet (source : Twitter)

As of now, prompt engineering is a legitimate high-level skill in the world of AI, providing competitive salaries, exciting opportunities for skilled professionals, it’s a field that’s definitely worth considering.

Conclusion

So, in the end we conclude that prompt engineering has the potential to become a rising job opportunity in 2023. Due to the increase in the demand for AI language models, it will lead to a need for individuals, skilled in creating and improving prompts as the job involves developing AI prompts that can understand and respond to user queries more accurately.

The job role needs some advance level skills such as machine learning, data analytics, and programming. However, it is important to always keep track with the latest job trends and predictions because they are not always constant forever and it is recommended to gather more information and do your own research before making any career decisions.

Prompt Engineering may or may not be your job opportunity in 2023!….. but following me on medium and subscribing to my weekly articles, will offer you a great opportunity to learn something new every week about the latest AI, tech topics and discussions.

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FilmyFlix
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Written by FilmyFlix

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