I had never heard of "prompt engineering" until this week.
Prompt engineering is the process where you guide generative artificial intelligence to generate outputs. Generative AI needs detailed, well-constructed instructions if it is going to give you high-quality results.
IBM, MIT, Purdue, Microsoft, and others offer training on how to do prompts, i.e. "engineer" them. If you take and pass their classes you can put it on your resume.
Each generation needs to master the technology of its era. My great grandparents needed to know how to farm with horses. My grandparents needed to know how to patch the tubes on car tires.
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| IBM Selectric II, Correcting |
As a college student I needed to know how to correct typos using coverup tape. The IBM Selectric with its spinning ball and eraser tape did it for me in my first jobs out of college.
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| Teamster |
Teamsters of old needed to know how to direct teams of horses that were in front of them, mostly with a light touch of reins laying across the horses' shoulders, a valuable skill for centuries. It is a valuable skill to prompt an AI program, for now. Our guest post author warns that soon AI will intuit what we are asking it to do.
Until then, prompt engineering.
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| Coster |
Guest Post by John Coster
There is much written these days about the disruptive technology that hit the world last year: generative AI; especially large language models (LLM). Early dismissive comments were silenced when a NY Times article , transcribed parts of a disturbing "conversation" with Microsoft's "Sydney". It's worth reading the entire article if you want to be creeped out. Sydney seemed volitional, sentient or even sapient. In slightly over 12 months, AI has taken the world by storm, and not just LLMs. AI has not only infiltrated more areas of our lives, but it has also created whole new domains that previously did not exist. Who needs porn stars when you can customize a realistic avatar to your liking? Who needs to know how to construct any kind of essay when you can ask AI to write it for you?
Opinions about the societal implications or even what it means to be human are all over the board. History has shown that technology and automation always displace human workers, but up until now, they have not threatened knowledge workers, including highly paid software engineers. That is no longer true. So, the question on nearly every early-to-mid career professional person's mind is "what skills do I need to flourish or even survive in the new AI-driven economy?"
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| NVIDIÅ GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip |
I work in the tech sector at the intersection of the physical and digital. My team designs and builds data centers that house systems that enable this kind of technology. Nvidia is the new darling with a market cap of three trillion dollars because it is the only company (so far) that can make the chips that handle the kind of computational workload that AI demands. It feels like a gold rush right now. Hundreds of billions are being invested to develop the most disruptive technology since the Internet.
So, what does it all mean? One of the new skills being touted is "prompt engineering" or knowing how to ask AI the best questions to get the best outcomes. Many large companies hold training on how to best do this. Our company strongly encourages us to use AI to write performance reviews. I hear other large tech companies have mandates to do the same. My experience was quick and easy, and all I did was clean up some of the clunky wording. But many of us wonder if prompt engineering is even a real or enduring skill, or will our queries over time simply train AI to anticipate what we need before we ask? What does this portend for critical thinking skills at a time when we most need them?
This seems like the one technology that is racing faster than we can assess the legal, technical, ethical, economic or social implications.
UPCOMING POSTS: World War II veterans. AI clarifies Judge Juan Merchan's jury instructions. The Hunter Biden trial. More conversations with Republican defenders of Trump. We live in interesting times.
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16 comments:
I recently had my young dentist exam my teeth and I stated his job would be one of the last to be replaced by robots. He quickly agreed and said it was the reason he chose dentistry over other options. Lawyers,psychologists,financial advisors,physicians are some of the white collar jobs that are at risk. Glad I’m old as I wouldn’t know what to go into. Maybe carpentry or plumbing are safe for a while. Truck drivers make good money today, but for how long?
RE: NVidia making the AI chips everyone wants right now
I would suggest that NVidia designs those chips, but since they are a FABless company, they actually rely on other semiconductor companies to fabricate those chips.
As for AI learning, and possible limitations...
My daughter-in-law recently received her PhD from Clemson, and we've had several discussions about how AI learns. Thus far, there is a lot of collecting and digesting of raw information. Some of the info is very good, and some of it is quite bad.
The challenge for AI software developers today is creating the algorithms that the chips can use to harvest and analyze the information. They also need to create rules that determine what is valid, and what is not.
We know that those developers aren't perfect, otherwise, we would be seeing the need to update our phones, tablets, and computers seemingly every few days.
And those who have read the book, "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks decades ago will know that with software development, typically new bugs appear due to the changes made to fix other bugs.
There are successes we see each day that are AI related though they weren't called AI when they first appeared.
Anyone who has used Google or Apple Maps to determine directions routing on our highways is using a form of AI.
I can't wait until AI has learned enough so that I can become a millionaire by asking one of the many apps this question: "what investment can I buy with $1,000 today, that will guarantee growth and be worth $1,000,000 in 30 days?"
Today, the answer will likely be a shorter variation of, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lsExRvJTAI
As a person who oversaw the design and construction of projects for large energy users, it would have been good if Mr. Coster had addressed the exorbitant demands being made for water and energy by A.I. data centers. These are resources wars are fought over.
Speaking of antiquated skills, I remember when legislators utilized compromise and the peaceful transfer of power. Now it’s Deep Fakes and insurrection. Another antiquated tool is conscience. It used to be that people had to justify causing harm to others. Now A.I can do it for you, not that Republican defenders of Trump need any help.
The high hopes some people have for A.I. reminds me of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Hyper-intelligent beings built a great supercomputer called Deep Thought and asked it to calculate the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. After seven and a half million years, it came up with the answer: “42.”
AI at this point can only regurgitate information that is already known. So from that point of view it's useful since most communication is simply repetition. Most of what I've seen so far strikes me as the work of a bright child, requiring correction, as was noted, and not particularly inspiring.
From a creative aspect I don't see how the technology can output anything novel. It's true, the amount of knowledge humans have amassed is beyond the ability of most to even comprehend, but in that information are the clues to finding answers and solving problems resulting from complex system interactions. It's human intuition that does that, and I'm not sure it can be synthesized.
So as a tool AI will increase productivity, and bring some disruption. The fear is that we manufacture a brain that becomes mentally ill, so I suggest we understand that better before we go much further.
PACCAR ( Kenworth, Peterbilt) have been testing self driving trucks for at least a decade. I'm a retired truck driver, and think that particular skill set has a looming sunset, perhaps within the next decade.Self driven trucks will not be constrained by logbooks and restrictive driving hours with mandated rest & sleeper hours, won't demand expensive Medical Insurance or Retirement plans etc.
I'm old, and like to think I'm current on things, and just aware enough to realize I'm probably fooling myself. I do know I don't want to depend on AI for my medical needs, preferring to be face to face with my human Doc, even if it's by a Computer connection.
A recent visit to an Emergency Room resulted in two teleconference discussions with two different Neurologists, neither of whom I had any idea of where they were actually physically located, but at least I could see there faces, and vice versa. A Brave New World, indeed. It makes me glad I'm old.
"A daily blog about politics."
tRump is the Great White Dope. He wants to save his cult of White Dopes from independent-minded women, people of color, non-Christians and immigrants from non-European ("sh**hole") countries.
Until the election in November, all decent, patriotic Americans should be focused on defeating the Great White Dope. Yes, other things in our lives are important also. But the election clock is ticking. This is no time to be attacking President Biden. Do you really want four more years of MAGA in the White House, hanging Ukraine out to dry, paling around with dictators, turning pregnant females into criminals, slashing taxes for wealthy Americans and all the rest?
You snooze you lose. MAGA is wide awake. Don't ignore the alarm.
By the way, it is unfortunate that you define this blog as being about the "Era of..." (tRump). He doesn't deserve the recognition. You are giving him exactly what he wants and adding fuel to the (dumpster) fire.
You like music. In the song "Imagine," John Lennon wanted listeners to see above and beyond. Imagine the world without tRump constantly in the headlines and dominating our politics and our discourse. Americans can make it happen in November.
AI is definitely A, but maybe not so much I. Jaron Lanier, one of the more visionary computer scientists, describes the current new AI as getting to collaborate with the collective (online) wisdom of humanity.
It’s a tool, and it’s going to disrupt the economy in various ways, but it doesn’t look to me like there is any reason to call it “smart“ or “intelligent” or “conscious.“
I had a great career as a software engineer, but I might be hesitant about going into that field these days as a young person, unless I thought I was a superstar. Of course, in my younger days, I did think I was a superstar. That lasted until I got a job at Xerox in Palo Alto in 1980, and encountered some of the real superstars.
If John Lennon were still with us:
Imagine there’s no police force…
I wonder if he would have been capable of learning something from how badly that idea turned out.
John Lennon’s “Imagine” didn't call for 'no police force.' It was a beautiful call for peace and an end to war. Since we obviously need peace officers, I’m sure he’d prefer they just act like it. And since there never was no police force, it turned out just fine.
Of course, sometimes they can be overwhelmed, such as when the president incites his whackos and sics them on our national Capitol. But of course his apologists have some excuse for how that wasn't his fault. He isn't guilty of anything - he said so himself.
I suggested imagining what John Lennon might say now,if he were still with us. Responding that the original song didn’t call for “no police force“ fundamentally misses the point.
While we might be able to imagine a Utopia in which everyone has the values of John Lennon, we actually have to live in this world, which is nothing like that one, and which is not going to become anything like that one anytime soon.
Not sure what John Lennon has to do with artificial intelligence. In my opinion he's a better example of the real thing. You may say he's a dreamer, but he's not the only one.
“Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can”.
Lennon himself certainly couldn’t. Or didn’t. Or didn’t try, even to dream, as he wholly abandoned his first wife and first son, including financially, as he basked in comparatively limitless wealth. Maybe it was just an idle, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing dream, like the rest of it. No, he sure wasn’t the only one. Nice melody, though.
Actually, when John and Cynthia were divorced, the decree included a settlement of over $2 million each for her and his son Julian. But that still doesn't have much to do with A.I.
The dream turned out badly for the dreamers everywhere they tried abolishing or defunding the police, Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle were prime examples.
Imagine there’s no common sense… 😱☹️🤡
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