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Comment by ary | Hacker News Reader

What, exactly, is a "prompt engineer"?

I should note that this question is asked in good faith, that I have attempted to ascertain the answer on my own, and I am very skeptical that the term has validity beyond self-aggrandizement.

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Speculation on this exact term, but for a few years now within the ML world, there's this notion of "attacks on neural networks" [1], [2]. That is, forcing the model to output a "bad" output, or flooding input data to really screw with its weights/gear it towards what an adversary might want. Say, classify a cat as a mountain, or, in a self-driving context, force a Tesla to miscategorize a stop sign.

Applied to Chat-GPT, a charitable take on this self-aggrandizement would be that the speaker has requires deep knowledge on the model they're attacking, in the same way a reverse engineer generally knows how X system is built. But I'm just being nice.

[1] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2019/file/7fea637fd6d02...

[2] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec21-vicarte.pdf

I prefer to use the term “vibing with chatGPT” which is why I don’t get paid for it.

I vibe alot

Engineer does tend to get tacked on to self-created titles for self-aggrandizement.

Signed,

A programmer

Very true.

But are you a programmer who looks up to or down on software developers?

I think in the world of finance “programmer” is the fancy math phd writing math which happens to be expressed in code that makes all the money and is prestigious whereas in silicon valley tech it’s a slur meant to imply that the individual is an infinitesimal step up from doing data entry. I’m guessing you’re just not an ass but the terminology tickles me every time I run across it.

I am an ass, but for reasons unrelated to my job title choices :)

Actually I am a grad student in an engineering department doing mostly coding stuff, so I guess it is a stretch to even make claim to the less prestigious programmer title. But in any case, that was the one I was thinking of; I wasn’t aware of the finance programmers.

Prompt engineering is the process of improving the way you prompt AI so that it produces more accurate and higher quality results.

Its definitely a skill that you can refine over time.

It's weird to see the negative response to this title. Maybe it's a reaction to people attaching a title to something they feel like everyone should be able to do. "Dog trainer" is a title because many dog owners can't or don't want to go to the effort to train their own dog. It seems like the same reason why an organization might pay someone to be a prompt engineer, for now anyway.

I’d like to point out that a company recently offered a prompt engineering position with a $250k salary. So the claims that it’s self aggrandizement / etc seem to miss the point that prompt engineering can earn you a hefty salary right now.

I'm not a prompt engineer but prompt engineering is a real skill* and you can specialize for different models. For example, a good and well informed prompt engineer will have intuitions that GPT like LLMs are bad at arithmetic tasks even before they ever made a single prompt because they understand or at least have a good idea of how these models actually work. Sure, they won't know for real, unless they've tried to make the models to arithmetic.

I think the very best prompt engineers for GPT3/GPT4 are working at OpenAi. I would be very surprised if no "guardrails" put around ChatGPT are implemented using embeddings. It makes perfect sense to use embeddings to put up guardrails and makes perfect sense as to why there are jail breaks.

* I wouldn't call it a real discipline yet.

edit: rephrase

SQL engineer for the new generation. And this one just found an injection vulnerability.

It's really just artistry, trial and error-based knowledge, and creativity behind figuring out what particular inputs to the program generate desirable outputs.

I take this to mean engineer is a more loose, even pejorative way. Like a social engineer for example.

It's mostly self-aggrandizement. It's just a term for someone who can write very specific and unambiguous instructions, people with general analytic thinking are usually pretty good at it whether they be philosophers, programmers or mathematicians.

I would think the proper term should be “prompt technician.” Like an x-ray technician.

Self aggrandisement for sure - but then again it’s probably better than a possible alternative of Promptgrammer (prompt + programmer)

It’s someone who does the AI equivalent of social engineering.

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