“Expert prompt engineers can name their price.”
Six Figures
While the rest of the world is rightfully concerned about ChatGPT coming to take their jobs, some companies are offering six-figure salaries to a select few who are great at wringing results out of next-gen AI chatbots.
As Bloomberg reports, some companies are offering salaries of up to a sizzling $335,000 per annum for so-called “prompt engineer” positions. In essence, these are supposed to be ChatGPT wizards who are so good at the tech that they can train other people on how to use it more effectively.
Albert Phelps, one of these lucky prompt engineers who works at a subsidiary of the Accenture consultancy firm in the UK, told Bloomberg that the job entails being something of an “AI whisperer,” regardless of educational background, with folks who have degrees as disparate as history, philosophy, or English.
“It’s wordplay,” he said. “You’re trying to distill the essence or meaning of something into a limited number of words.”
Phelps himself, at only 29, studied history before beginning a career in financial consulting and ultimately pivoting to AI. On a given day at his job, the youthful AI wizard and his colleagues will write about five different prompts and have 50 individual interactions with large language models like ChatGPT.
Growth Market
While there’s been a proliferation of low-hanging fruit gigs — there’s even a freelance prompt engineer marketplace similar to Fiverr called PromptBase, where people sell their prompt-writing skills for $3-10 a pop — those who get particularly good at writing prompts can draw huge salaries.
Just take it from Mark Standen, the owner of an AI, automation, and machine learning staffing business in the UK and Ireland, who told Bloomberg that prompt engineering is “probably the fastest-moving IT market I’ve worked in for 25 years.”
“Expert prompt engineers can name their price,” Standen said, noting that while the jobs start at the pound sterling equivalent of about $50,000 per year in the UK, there are candidates in his company’s database looking for between $250,000 and $360,000 per year.
The Bloomberg report notes that naturally, there’s no way to know when or if the bubble will burst on this newly-created title, but all the same, earning a six-figure salary to write chatbot prompts, even for just a year or two, sounds a lot better than losing your job to AI.
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