The Future Belongs to Prompt Engineers
Although the platforms
that will run AI will largely belong to big tech. There will still be plenty of
opportunities for startups to live in this new world.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD
TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH
INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
MAR 12, 2024
In my next life, I think
I'd like to be a prompt engineer. If you don't know what that is, I'm not
really surprised; most people don't. But you should learn because in the
next decade these folks are going to be among the most valuable, strategic, and
in-demand employees in any company.
Prompt engineers learn
how to think like a machine. Your business will need to find and hire these
folks if you plan to be competitive for the same reason that most NFL football
teams have more data scientists on their rosters than they do quarterbacks. Data
is the oil of the digital age, and its use and proper application will drive
every kind of company in the future.
If you plan to scale
your business, you can be sure that you'll need to augment your team's own
actions and decision making with machine-driven technologies to be able to
match the speed, recall and reaction times of the competition. In the digital
world, speed kills in a good way. Prompt engineers are the humans who will
translate our queries and be our primary interfaces to the existing and
constantly emerging massive AI knowledge systems, artificial neural networks,
machine-learning environments and large language models (LLMs). These AI engines are now being built by
the country's largest tech companies and rapidly deployed around the globe. As
you might expect, the prime players are the usual suspects and the only ones
who can afford the required investments while, of course, our government itself
(unlike China's) isn't even in the game. Once again, it's gonna be a
winners-take-all world.
There's also a powerful
and discouraging reminder here of the early days of the computer gaming
industry, where dozens of entrepreneurs thought they'd build their own game
machines, interfaces, and programs. Over a relatively short period of time,
these dreams were crushed by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, each of whom
developed a dominant platform and basically required all the other industry
players to develop games that would run on top their platforms.
While stupid and greedy
venture investors will invest and lose billions betting on AI nuts-and-bolts
startups, it appears entirely likely that the real battle for platform
dominance is largely over. The playing field will be owned and operated
by the same half dozen or so tech giants--Apple, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, et al.
-- that already own search, the desktop, our phones, email and messaging, video,
and large slices of the Internet itself.
Everyone else will be
remitted to running on top of these platforms, and as licensees or
"partners," with the gatekeepers of these major systems. As the
industry giants continue to build out the underlying infrastructure for these
processing environments, the most likely and potentially profitable
opportunities for entrepreneurs and new business builders will be in developing
industry and market-specific tools and applications that make use of the
capabilities of the LLMs and other versions of the machines, rather than trying
to create new versions of the systems and machines themselves.
This is actually good
news in one respect: little guys will still have a place in the
ecosystem. The successful smaller and more agile players will be more organized
around supporting business operations, exploiting their industry and market
knowledge, and enhancing business logistics, rather than on building costly and
super-technical programs that take years to develop and are likely to be copied
and overrun by extensions of the established players' offerings. In addition,
the capital costs of entry for specific solution suppliers will be considerably
less, as will be, at least initially, the cost of attracting and retaining
scarce talent.
Amazon of old was a good
example of this business versus bits distinction. Today, they call themselves
an A.I.-driven tech biz, but at the beginning, Amazon was all about logistics,
location, execution and speed. Their tech was okay, but the competitive edge
was their aggressive leadership, industry knowledge base, powerful analytics,
and people who were hungry, competitive, and scrappy workhorses rather than
kids, academics and computer jocks. They quickly came to know the basic book
business better than the big guys in the space and beat them at their own game.
Also, in fairness, the development work, and advances that Amazon has made with
Alexa in terms of voice recognition, interpretation, and conversation
continuity have helped dramatically move the A.I. needle forward. That work
remained largely under the radar for many years - whether by design or media
inattention.
Knowing what's important
to ask and how to frame the right questions of the new machines will be the
most critical competitive skill set in the new A.I.-enabled economy. That's
because, as often as not, it's harder to shape and design the precise question
than it is to eventually find the correct answers. The skills required to do
this job well are far more practical and qualitative talents rather than the
more quantitative and purely technical ones we ordinarily associate with
computer scientists and engineers.
Anyone who has ever
asked Google a question and had the unsettling experience of being told in
response that there are "about 1,250,000 search results" knows
that limiting and narrowly stating your inquiry is the key to achieving any
simple and useful answer. In much the same way, the current LLMs are way too
much of a good thing and need to be tamed and bounded. In fact, at the moment
the best way on the web to get the right answer to a question is to post the
wrong answer and wait for the good Samaritans and the trolls to weigh in.
Smart prompt engineers
will iteratively fashion and input the "prompts" or plain English
questions, which will ask the generative machines for increasingly precise and
detailed answers, solutions, directions, evaluations, statistical relationships,
and other responses. This will all be based on the machines' compilations,
interpretations, and discovered connections, which it will theoretically draw
from literally all of the digital data and accumulated knowledge in the world.
The latest advances have enabled the machines to retain the content and context
of earlier inquiries and incorporate those requests into the continuing series
of prompts, which has made the iterative process somewhat easier and more
consistent.
What's especially
attractive about becoming a prompt engineer is that anyone can learn the job
and - as far as I can tell - not only don't you need an extensive technical
background or an expensive education, you simply need a lot of common sense, an
extensive vocabulary, the ability to constantly iterate and tighten down
queries on a wide range of subjects, and a passion for problem solving,
crossword puzzles, Scrabble and Wordle. Readers, writers, liberal arts grads,
and kids straight out of high school are all welcome. It's about aptitude and
knowledge, not college -- what you know, not where you go. It also helps to be
hyper-literal and anal as well, but that's not essential. Remember that these
people are trying to learn to think like the machine they're interacting with.
And even if you (or your
kids) aren't looking for a new career, and don't have access yet to the latest
and greatest tools, you should still spend a few minutes experiencing these
back-and-forth conversations. I recommend trying Microsoft's
Copilot which is free, readily appended to its suite of Office
products, and couldn't be easier to use. It invites you to "ask it
anything" and it's an interesting trip down whatever rabbit hole strikes
your fancy. And more than a little addictive. You can start to build your
own company-specific questions and also do a little DIY experiment to see how
these systems can make sense out of, and better organize, your business's own
data, historical information, and customer input about their experiences in
order to provide support for and augment the performance and behaviors of your
team.
Having instant access to
the world's storehouse of accumulated information, literature, and knowledge at
your fingertips is a very exciting and empowering feeling. One which will
give you a clear idea of why so many people are thrilled, awed, and scared by
the possibilities, opportunities, and challenges of these new tools. AI is all
about careful curation and filtering the flood at this point. Prompt engineers
will be steering the ship and leading the way.
