Prompt Engineering Is “Not” the Future for You or Your Company
In the realm of generative AI (artificial intelligence) companies are scrambling to adopt and integrate AI into their businesses. As a result prompt engineering has emerged as the hot topic, promising lucrative salaries, new career paths, and competitive moats. While AI is a transformative field providing new business models, productivity gains and easing workloads; the focus on prompt engineering is misguided. Let's delve deeper into the reasons why prompt engineering is not and – in this author’s opinion – will not live up to its hype and expectations.
Overhyped Perceptions and Realities
Prompt engineering has been touted as the next high paying career by Forbes (The Hot, New High-Paying Career Is An AI Prompt Engineer) and Linked (The Rise of Prompt Engineering as a High-Paying Job) . Even the World Economic forum calls it a “job of the future.”
The fantastical articles with the allure of $250K+ salaries don’t tell the whole story – the cynic in me says – they are selling headlines to get eyeballs; they are not doing any real thinking.
Every new technology goes through a skill demand imbalance. When new technology enters the market, there is a low supply of well-trained experts on the new technology. The companies with the greatest resources and greatest need can pay ridiculous amounts to get those scarce people. But the market forces will balance out; they balance out quickly, especially when skill doesn’t require a lengthy training process. Certainly, prompt engineering doesn’t take as long as college degree. Rather taking a few classes on Coursera, Udemy or Open University along some real world practice suffices for most situations.
Beyond temporary supply imbalance, job listings usually require a host of other skills encompassing AI and machine learning expertise. Both of which, are skills that require greater knowledge and training.
In short, it’s not hard to learn prompt engineering; as people learn about prompting, the salaries will come down; prompt engineering is not a good long-term career choice.
A Quickly Shifting AI Landscape
AI technologies are moving fast – really fast! When large language models first appeared, they appeared with the simplest of human-machine interfaces: an input box for typing in a prompt.
It’s obvious that this version 1.0 chat interface needs to be improved. While we are waiting for it to be improved, it’s natural for us to want to use it in the best way possible. So, it’s no surprise that we noticed some people are good at “engineering” prompts to get better results than those that simply type in a question.
But many of the brightest minds are working on version 2.0. We already have chat bots that help you write a better prompt.
Others, like Perplexity.ai, are taking a different approach. They had a simple idea to take Google search and marry it with a Chat model – no prompt engineering necessary. You type in your question, it searches, and synthesizes the internet to provide answers with source citations AND most importantly it automatically suggests follow-up prompts for you to dig deeper into the subject.
In other words, the algorithms themselves will make prompt engineering obsolete. AI system will simply ask the user what they need, and then create their own internal prompts to provide the desired answers. And customized to each person’s knowledge and abilities.
Accessibility and Business Applications
Beyond the realm of simplistic prompt-based interactions we are figuring out how to seamlessly embed chat into business applications. The fervor to hide the prompt engineering into a custom business application is astounding. There are over 10,000 AI tools on listing services like (AI Top Tools, AI Tools Directory, Startup AI Tools)
Startup AI Tools has more than 70 different categories, including Writing Assistant, Website Builders, Virtual Assistants, Video Generations, Marketing, Logo Makers, Data Scraping, Chatbot builders, Research, Lead Generation and so much more.
In other words, companies should not be training everyone to be a prompt engineers.
No Competitive Advantage
The AI juggernaut may well be the most disruptive force since the electric grid, but let’s not be hoodwinked by the glimmer of ‘prompt engineering’ as its crowning achievement. Artificial Intelligence is expanding into countless applications—self-driving vehicles, medical diagnostics, personalized education, and more. Prompt engineering is but a tiny piece of this shift to abundant AI.
Moreover, while being adept at prompt crafting may seem like a novel advantage today, it hardly equates to a sustainable competitive edge. In this hyper changing world, the shelf-life of such a “prompt engineer” skill is incredibly short-lived. What truly moves the needle are deep-seated capabilities built into the software that make the human-machine interface as natural as the human-to-human interface.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this article highlights the limitations of relying solely on prompt engineering as a strategy for company improvement (or for long term career advancement.) Instead, companies should prioritize building adaptability and resilience to navigate the rapidly changing landscape of AI. The future demands a more holistic approach beyond tactical solutions like prompt engineering. Stay tuned for upcoming articles where I will explore strategies for maintaining agility in the evolving world of AI.