Thorsten Strauss recently sent a funny observation to me that “ the Prompt Engineer is the new Growth Hacker.”
The AI Prompt Engineer is suddenly an in-demand job, as organizations scramble how to work with generative AI. Insider recently reported salaries up to $375k for prompt engineers, even for those without a tech background.
It’s currently a seller’s market and “AI Prompt Engineer” is getting added to many a LinkedIn profile.
And yet, Andrew Mayne, who runs the Comms Lab at OpenAI (and was himself an early prompt engineer at OpenAI in 2020) recently observed:
“The term ‘prompt engineer’ is feeling as antiquated as ‘typist’ or ‘computer operator’. We’re all prompt engineers now.”
A decade ago, Growth Hacker was the trendy new job title. The shelf life of the Growth Hacker title passed quickly but elements of growth marketing endured.
Similarly, the role of stand-alone Prompt Engineers may not stand the test of time, but knowing how to work with AI tools increasingly will be table stakes.
In the long run, it’s less about the title du jour than about digital upskilling in general. AI prompt engineering is just one more area in an endless curriculum of digital upskilling we all have to pay attention to.
As I heard recently, it’s not so much the risk of AI coming for your job as the risk of someone who knows how to use AI coming for your job.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
