SAN FRANCISCO – Everybody is talking about the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT. Less noticed is a jobs market mushrooming around the technology, where these newly created roles can pay upwards of US$335,000 a year.They’re called “prompt engineers”, people who spend their day coaxing the AI to produce better results and help companies train their workforce to harness the tools.
Mr Phelps, 29, studied history at the University of Warwick near Birmingham, England, before starting his career as a consultant for banks like Clydesdale Bank and Barclays, helping them solve problems around risk and regulations. A talk from the Alan Turing Institute, a British government-funded institute for artificial intelligence, inspired him to research AI, leading to his role at Accenture.
The paradigm emerged in 2017, when AI researchers created “pre-trained” LLMs, which could be adapted to a wide range of tasks with the addition of a human text input. In the last year, LLMs like ChatGPT have attracted millions of users, who are all engaging in a form of prompt engineering whenever they tweak their prompts.
It’s now even possible to buy and sell text prompts via the PromptBase marketplace, which also helps people hire prompt engineers to create individual prompts for a fee. Outside of the tech world, companies in the financial, legal and insurance world are all experimenting with AI tools, which is also driving demand.
He cautioned that paralegals looking for a step up in income might be disappointed. “We don’t need a £300,000 expert, that’s ludicrous money,” said Mr West.