David is the cofounder of Aloa, a platform for outsourcing software development. Aloa has helped 300+ startups/companies build their tech.
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As the world progresses, the types of engineers required continue to evolve. The earliest known occurrence of an engineer comes back from ancient times, with military engineers being responsible for designing and building fortifications, siege engines and other military structures.
Fast forward thousands of years, and you start to see civil engineers being introduced. We then move into the digital age, and software engineers cement their spot in the world of engineering. Now, with AI taking the world by storm, the next type of engineering skill that is becoming high in demand is prompt engineering.
What Prompt Engineering Is
Prompt engineering is the practice and process of crafting strategic questions to ultimately reach your desired output when leveraging a language model or other machine learning systems. If we look at prompt engineering when it comes to ChatGPT, a reference many of us are now familiar with, prompt engineering involves the effort of typing questions into the chat bar.
The skill of prompt engineering may seem trivial, but it truly is a skill. An effective prompt engineer understands the language model’s capabilities, limitations and tendencies, tailoring the input prompt to guide the model toward generating the desired content. A good prompt engineer is someone who can retrieve their desired outcome with their first effort.
The skillset needed by a prompt engineer will differ depending on what you’re looking to receive from your AI application. If you’re looking for the answer to "What is 2+2," well, that is an easy prompt with a very straightforward answer and, therefore, doesn’t require much engineering.
However, imagine you need your AI model to spit out code that allows you to perform certain actions while avoiding specific errors. To receive your desired output, you need to ask the question in a certain way so that the language model will not only be able to understand but will be able to return the exact outcome you are looking for.
Applications Of Prompt Engineers
There are many reasons you’d want a prompt engineer—someone focused on the most efficient outcome when it comes to leveraging AI models. Some applications can include controlling creativity, fine-tuning responses, mitigating bias and enhancing accuracy.
1. Controlling Creativity: Adjusting prompts allows users to control the level of creativity or specificity in the generated content. As the prompt engineer, you can determine how detailed you want the reply to be. The deeper your instructions are, the more creatively you can influence a unique output.
2. Fine-Tuning Responses: By tweaking the words or sentence structure of a prompt, you can influence the model to provide more contextually accurate responses. For example, if you’re writing a paper on the history of the invention of the wheel, you probably will want to know the founding of the wheel across different civilizations. This requires you to engineer your question to ensure the AI model knows you’re looking for multiple answers.
3. Mitigating Bias: Prompt engineering can be used to reduce biases in model outputs by leading the questions to return a more objective reply based solely on facts. You can encourage models to ignore certain voices or look specifically for objective references.
4. Enhancing Accuracy: Crafting specific and targeted prompts will help you generate more accurate outputs. The more specific and tailored your question, the more value you’ll get out of the effort.
Skepticism Of Prompt Engineers
It’s always important to understand why individuals may be bearish on prompt engineers in the rapidly developing world of AI. According to a Harvard Business Review article, prompt engineering is simply not the future.
The article outlines how, in today’s world, where we are at with AI’s advancement, prompt engineering is useful and important. However, as technology advances, AI models, too, will advance and become more intuitive. This means that, inherently, over time, the value of a good engineer could be replaced by more sophisticated AI mechanisms.
Wrapping It Up
All in all, while the future doesn’t have a definitive roadmap, what we can discern from the information available to us is that in today’s world, prompt engineering is a valuable skill to harness. While technology may make this role less impactful as time goes on, it currently retains value and can help position you as a stronger employee or job candidate.
Put simply, this is the science of asking really good questions. So even if the role of prompt engineering diminishes, the skillset of knowing how to ask good and targeted questions is an attractive trait to embrace.
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{Author}David Pawlan, Forbes Councils Member{/Author}
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