what skills to learn to earn up to $335,000 on ChatGPT

AI in recent years has not only destroyed many of our ideas about in-demand specialties, but also created a professional field that did not exist before – prompt engineering.

To work as a seed or hint engineer (there is still no consensus on the translation of the term), you need to know how to create pompts that generate the desired responses from AI models such as GPT-3 and GPT-4.

The main argument “for” – salary

Is it worth spending time on learning a new specialty or is it better to focus on something more serious? The salaries of prompt engineers definitely attract attention.

For example, at Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company, there is a position “prompt engineer and librarianwith a salary of $175,000 to $335,000 per year.

And this is not the only firm looking for prompt engineers! Let’s take a closer look at what an AI seed specialist does, how to become one, and what are the requirements for this position.

What does a prompt engineer do

A Prompt Engineer is someone who develops and refines AI models using Prompt Engineering techniques. It’s like teaching the model how to do something by giving step-by-step instructions or “hints”.

Prompt engineers work with large language models such as GPT-3 (or the new GPT-4) that can generate human-like responses to text prompts. Their work focuses on two main areas:

developing prompts that generate desired responses based on language models;
improving the language models themselves to provide more accurate and relevant textual output.

Here are some of the typical tasks that a prompt engineer usually performs:

Optimizing language models using proven methods and tools.
Writing texts to test the AI system for an unusual response. In this way, both errors and hidden AI capabilities can be identified.
Analyze datasets to identify “language” patterns and trends that will help develop new and better cues.
Development and maintenance of documentation for language models (examples, instructions, best practices, etc.)
Train language models on new datasets and monitor their performance to identify areas for improvement
Collaboration with data scientists and developers to integrate language models into software applications and systems.

Although tooltip experts don’t write code all day, they still need some programming knowledge to be able to work with datasets, design and tune language models, and collaborate with technicians.

How to Learn Prompt Engineering

Because for this specialty, it is not necessary to know programming, even a complete “humanities student” can potentially become a prompt engineer.

In fact, it is enough to type in a search engine or a smart chat bot with GPT on board the cherished phrase “free prompt engineering courses” and choose one of the options you like. Courses for prompt engineers are already offered even by such trust sites as Udemy And codecademy.

Once you’ve learned the basics, you can continue to develop your AI skills as a systems engineer by following the steps below.

Learn the Basics of Programming: As an engineer, you will need to work with datasets and understand basic programming concepts. To do this, you need to get to know the Python language better.
Learn the concepts of natural language processing (NLP) and machine Learning (ML): Prompt engineers must be familiar with NLP and ML concepts such as text preprocessing, feature engineering, model training, and optimization.
Practice developing prompts and fine-tuning language models: Learn to use hint development techniques to generate textual output from language models. Test different types of prompts and fine-tune language models to improve performance.
Build a Prompt Engineering Project Portfolioto demonstrate your experience to a potential employer.

And what about the job for 335 thousand dollars

Anthropic pays top-notch prompt engineers up to $335,000. She specializes in the development of general AI systems and language models, which may explain such a high salary. Not surprisingly, Google has invested almost $400 million in this company.

Here are some requirements for this job:

Excellent communicator, loves to teach technical concepts and create high quality documentation that helps others.
High-level familiarity with the architecture and operation of large language models
Basic programming skills – it will be convenient to write small programs in Python
Keep up to date with the latest developments in AI by taking an active interest in new research and industry trends.

It is worth considering that this specialty is less than 2 years old, so the role, and most importantly the salary, of a prompt engineer may differ from one company to another. Salaries for similar positions at other companies may not be as generous as at Anthropic. For example, job vacancy for a Prompt Engineer position at Boston Children’s Hospital, posted by Indeed.

If we compare both vacancies, we will see that the requirements are different. The second ad is looking for people with 5 years of experience in development and at least 2 years of experience in AI and NLP, and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, AI, or a related field (preferably in healthcare).

Again, some companies may have higher or lower requirements, so if you don’t have experience, a project portfolio is the best way to get ahead of other applicants.