Prompt engineers chat with generative-AI chatbots (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions)

See Talking to Chatbots Is Now a $200K Job. So I Applied: Welcome to the world of prompt engineering, where you’re paid to get the best answers from AI by Joanna Stern of The WSJ. Related posts are listed below as well as some history of the term "creative destruction." Excerpts:

"Prompt engineering is a totally new job that would have sounded crazy even a year ago. But it can pay six-figure salaries to people who extract the best results from the mysterious artificial-intelligence black boxes that are now part of daily life."

"Natural as they sound, many chatbot answers are unwieldy, unhelpful and, sometimes, untrue." 

"Sure, AI can do some of our writing, computer coding and research jobs. But we wouldn’t want to bet our businesses on them alone.

nter the prompt engineer! This person fine-tunes the prompts that go into a generative-AI large-language model—aka LLM—to extract valuable but buried information for an employer or its clients. Think of it as an AI whisperer."

"On LinkedIn and the job-search site Indeed, thousands of listings came up for the search term “prompt engineer,” and among those that stated salary, the annual pay could range from $100,000 to over $200,000."

"you need to understand how these systems work, have specific tricks up your sleeve and, in some cases, be able to do some coding."

"“You can think of prompt engineering as programming in the English language,” George Sivulka, Hebbia’s chief executive and founder, told me."

"Instead of an analyst sifting through hundreds of pages to research a company, the AI can summarize and pull out key points for them."

"what the prompt engineer does: “Your role is to deeply understand our users’ needs, figure out and test the best way to prompt models to meet these needs, and then teach our users.”

Translation: Get the robots to cough up valuable answers to keep our human customers happy."

Related posts:

"Moms away from home" look after college students (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

Who wrote your potential love's online dating profile? (maybe they outsourced it to a professional who specializes in that) (2016)

New Profession Of "Wedding Hashtag Helper" Might Be An Example Of Creative Destruction At Work (2022)

Are dating coaches who help you with texting modern Cyrano de Bergeracs? (2023)

Do You Need a Fixer for Your Disney Vacation? Third-party companies tout advanced knowledge for private tours of complex amusement parks that can cost $1,000 and up (2023)

Parents Hire $4,000 Sorority Consultants to Help Daughters Dress and Impress During Rush (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

 

Creative Destruction

See Creative Destruction by Richard Alm and W. Michael Cox. Excerpt:

"Joseph Schumpeter
(1883–1950) coined the seemingly paradoxical term “creative destruction,” and generations of economists have adopted it as a shorthand description of the free market’s messy way of delivering progress. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), the Austrian economist wrote:

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. (p. 83)

Although Schumpeter devoted a mere six-page chapter to “The Process of Creative Destruction,” in which he described capitalism as “the perennial gale of creative destruction,” it has become the centerpiece for modern thinking on how economies evolve."

But also see this link which suggests that the idea goes back even before Schumpeter to other scholars: Creative Destruction in Economics: Nietzsche, Sombart, Schumpeter by Hugo Reinert and Erik S. Reinert.

"Abstract

This paper argues that the idea of ‘creative destruction’ enters the social sciences by way of Friedrich Nietzsche. The term itself is first used by German economist Werner Sombart, who openly acknowledges the influence of Nietzsche on his own economic theory. The roots of creative destruction are traced back to Indian philosophy, from where the idea entered the German literary and philosophical tradition. Understanding the origins and evolution of this key concept in evolutionary economics helps clarifying the contrasts between today’s standard mainstream economics and the Schumpeterian and evolutionary alternative."