Ask HN: How do you define an "AI engineer"? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you define an "AI engineer"?

16 pointsuma0829 comments

Is this persona a data scientist/data engineer/MLE?

Someone that previously worked on crypto :p

lmao

Someone who has no idea what they're doing, like not even the slightest clue. They spend 90% of their time curating datasets, call every executable file a "notebook," require detailed instructions on how to submit a pull request, hard-code user specific variables, forms URLs with query strings using string concatenation, doesn't read manpages, and listens to terrible music

When I think "AI engineer", I think of people working to develop AI engines, not people who are using the AI engines.

You don’t, stop adding the term “engineer” to any new trendy phrase, like “prompt engineer”! It lost its meaning and it doesn’t make you look professional either, it’s like calling yourself “phones doctor!”..

"Prompt engineering" isn't as bad as "social engineering" IMHO.

That said, if one's job is just to write prompts (hence "prompt engineer" without the "-ing")... maybe that's actually bad.

98% are people who can make http calls to OpenAI api.

2% actually work on OpenAI systems.

This is the correct answer.

accurate

There are a lot of models being worked on outside of OpenAI.

True. The ratio still seems reasonable though.

I interpret it as - A developer who can work with pre-packaged ML/LLM models that are offered by cloud companies

> Is this persona a data scientist/data engineer/MLE?

MLE, just a different name for it.

gotcha, thank you :)

NFT bros had their pixel avatars, AI has Stable Diffusion generated avatars :D For some reason you can't use a real photo in either of these fields of work.

What really defines an AI engineer:

A) Already used their $5 on OpenAI API B) Has llamacpp/ollama etc. in their CLI with a library of models C) Has 64GB+ VRAM which makes computer extremely loud possibly gas-powered

AI engineer is more of a combination of data engineer and MLE. An AI engineer would help productionize an algorithm or AI model developed by the researchers which would include deploying at scale to compute, providing access to trained models, and ability to update and serve the models.

Basically researchers develops on his laptop, AI engineer helps deliver it to customer's laptop.

Here's a web app engineer perspective: delivery to the customer's laptop is likely over HTTP so the mechanism is taking customer text input, calling API's and delivering results.

In its simplest form (again from a web app engineer's viewpoint) LLMs ingest text, organize that data (a very complicated process I don't understand fully, nor need to), and provide API's to output text given some set of inputs so this resembles very closely working on Elastic or other search engine technology. A caveat is the API's being called likely maintain state in the sense of keeping track of inputs, context and outputs. I would classify someone that is working on this as more of an API/backend engineer. They need to understand the AI/LLM data model being used which is very specific and the use cases around it but they did not engineer the AI/LLM data model themselves, it was likely some other R&D engineers.

Edit to add: AI engineer to me is the R&D people I reference above - the ones building the data model that others use.

Titles are meaningless in general. Within a well organized company it should be defined with a job spec. A job ad should describe the roll behind the title.

At my company they have ML engineer positions. However, I've found that most of them are just devs building APIs to interact with the model, or being a data jockey for the model. Basically, titles are almost meaningless.

What do you/what does your company want to see?

I'm a teacher who trains the kids you will be hiring in a few years. Tell me what to teach them.

I have no idea. The hiring managers can be all over the place.

In the USA, anyone can be an engineer. All they require is the will to call themselves an engineer. (Except for a few specific types). Eg, customer service engineers are now a thing

whoa!

>$400k/yr is AI Engineer.

Someone who mastered HTTP calls

And has filled out that silly form that lets you use Azure to make them.

Anyone that can get someone else to hire them as an "AI engineer".

An "AI Engineer" engineers AI solutions.

I don't

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