The Future Of Prompt Writing In Regards To AI

The growth of AI has led to different discussions on the future of jobs regarding loss of jobs and potential jobs. One of them are prompt engineers, prompt engineers have been a new and “growing” job in the market. But, the question is, will it actually become a new hot job? There are tons of discussions about the future of prompt engineering and how it will grow or if it will not grow, and if it should be a skill or a full job opportunity. While exploring this topic, I realized how little I knew about prompt engineering and at the same time how much we overestimate it.

First off, what is prompt engineering? According to Coursera, prompt engineering is the process of refining prompts that a person can input into a generative AI service to create text or images. An easier definition is writing provoking thoughts and questions using natural languages to have AI produce some sort of answer. When you think of it this way you may be thinking that you have been a prompt engineer all your life, because you would always be asking Google questions, and you know that Google searches doesn’t provide the right source on the first try. However, as AI grows, more companies and people want to utilize AI and part of the that is getting some sort of LLM.

LLM, short for Large Language Models, are sort of like the brain. It has all the capabilities to think and make decisions, all it needs is the information. After getting the information it needs, it will require training, after all you can learn all you want, but if you don’t know how to apply that knowledge, it doesn’t do anything for you. That is where prompt engineers come in. In this case, prompt engineers will create and write prompts in the LLM and those prompts are used to train the LLM causing it to learn, then allowing it to be more effective for your organization.

This is an example of how prompt engineering will work. However, there is another question that needs to be asked and its that, will any of this be usable? Recently a lot of these LLM and AI software have been producing false and fake information. AI is now telling people to eat glue and rocks. I believe this is because there is so much information out there that it can’t distinguish between legitimate and false information.

So considering all of this, what do I think is the future of prompt engineering? I believe prompt engineering is going to become a skill set to know. While I do believe it will become an important skill to have and it will be needed, I can’t see a future where there would be a full time job focused around creating prompts. What I do think will happen is that this will become an important skill for those who are experts in their fields.

This is because prompting is needed to train AI, and as more companies use LLM’s it will require experts to create prompts to train the AI on the specific topic or related field. And this also makes sense in regards to what Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA said. He said that experts in their fields who can properly write prompts, will be important in the future. While I don’t think there will be a need for hundreds of prompt engineers at one organization, I do believe this will become an important skill and it will be worth it to anyone to get better at.