Tech is known for high-paying jobs — and for one new hot job in the industry, you don’t even need a STEM degree. The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT is creating a need for “prompt engineers,” people who write questions and prose for AI chatbots to test and improve their answers. Some of these roles have salaries as high as $375,000 and don’t always require tech degrees. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has spoken about the need for prompt engineers. In February, he tweeted that “writing a great prompt for a chatbot persona is an amazingly high-leverage skill.”
A prompt engineer is responsible for crafting text inputs that effectively guide AI systems like ChatGPT to produce better results. They help companies train their workforce to harness AI tools and improve the performance of AI applications. With diverse educational backgrounds, prompt engineers often come from history, philosophy, or English language disciplines, as the role involves linguistic creativity and distilling complex ideas into concise prompts.
There are many startups and new tools to help engineer prompts, including PromptPerfect and PromptingGuide. Online schools are beginning to offer courses in prompting, and PromptBase is an online marketplace for buying and selling high-quality prompts. The list goes on and on and will undoubtedly grow.
The market for prompt engineers is growing. PromptBase, a prompt marketplace launched last June, allows people to hire prompt engineers or sell their prompts. Despite the opportunities in prompt engineering for people without tech backgrounds, most high-paying roles require people with more experience and higher levels of education in tech-focused areas, recruiters told Bloomberg.
“Salaries start at £40,000, but we’ve got candidates on our database looking for £200,000 to £300,000 a year. Expert prompt engineers can name their price.”
Mark Standen, Recruiter, Hays, a recruitment agency in the UK and Ireland
Prompt Engineers in Healthcare
Prompt engineers will play a crucial role in the healthcare industry’s future, designing and implementing prompts that improve patient outcomes. By working closely with healthcare providers and payers, they can understand each problem and find a solution. Effective prompts require constant monitoring and adjustment, ensuring they remain effective and efficient. Prompt engineers can help healthcare professionals make informed decisions by leveraging their skills and expertise, ultimately leading to better patient care.
For example, Boston Children’s posted a job posting in April for an “AI prompt engineer” to work on its innovation and digital health accelerator. The person will design and develop AI prompts using large language models like ChatGPT. Dr. John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s, believes that the skill set of the next decade is going to be someone with the skills of a prompt engineer. Someone who knows how to interface with large language models. Someone who knows how to ask the right questions to get the right detail. Someone who knows the boundaries by which these things work and that they don’t work.
Potential applications – Some potential applications in healthcare follow:
Data analysts analyze and interpret healthcare data to identify trends and insights that can inform the design and implementation of effective prompts. They collaborate closely with prompt engineers to develop and refine prompts, ensuring they are data-driven and aligned with healthcare providers’ and payers’ needs. Data analysts also monitor the prompt’s performance, providing regular reports and insights to prompt engineers, who use this feedback to make necessary adjustments and improve the prompt’s efficacy.
Clinical researchers can benefit from prompt engineering skills to improve data collection and analysis, which is essential for conducting clinical trials and research. Researchers can ensure more accurate and efficient data collection by utilizing prompts tailored to the study or trial.
Medical coders can also use prompt engineering skills to improve the medical coding process. With well-designed prompts, medical coders can create more efficient natural language processing algorithms to automate coding and reduce errors.
Medical education – Medical students, healthcare workers, and patients can all use Chat GPT as a tool in medical education in various ways. The capacity of Chat GPT to offer students tailored learning experiences is one of its most important benefits. It can communicate with students, ascertain their educational requirements, and deliver pertinent and timely information. Access to a multitude of medical knowledge, including anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, and pathology, is available to medical students through Chat GPT. The program can assist students in learning complex ideas, studying for tests, and preparing for clinical rotations. Additionally, it can give rapid feedback on students’ progress and point out areas that need more research.
ChatGPT in medical education has several benefits over conventional teaching techniques. Its capacity to offer pupils tailored learning experiences is one of its most important benefits. The AI app can adjust to the individual learning requirements of every student, delivering pertinent information in real time that can enhance learning outcomes by increasing student engagement, knowledge retention, and acquisition. Additionally, Chat GPT is accessible 24/7, making it a convenient tool for medical students, healthcare workers, and patients. This can lessen geographic obstacles to medical education and improve access to medical knowledge. The capacity of Chat GPT to produce human-like responses is another benefit of utilizing it in medical teaching. The chatbot can carry on detailed discussions and comprehend the conversation’s context, which enables it to offer incredibly appropriate responses. This can raise the standard of medical education and improve students’ learning opportunities.
While Chat GPT has several benefits over conventional teaching techniques, there are several drawbacks to its application in medical education. One of its key drawbacks is that it cannot offer experiential learning opportunities. ChatGPT cannot replace the necessity of hands-on training in medical education, which is only possible through practical training. Additionally, Chat GPT is reliant on the caliber of the training data. The reliability of the chatbot’s responses may be affected if the data is biased or inaccurate. For Chat GPT to give accurate and trustworthy information, it is crucial to guarantee that the data used to train it is accurate and unbiased.
There may also be roles in developing AI-powered prompt engineering tools within healthcare IT. These roles may involve machine learning, NLP, and data analytics expertise.
Challenges in Prompt Engineering in Healthcare
When it comes to NLP tasks in the medical field, prompt engineering faces several challenges. First, medical data is usually limited and specialized, making it difficult to cover all domain knowledge and thus restricting the model’s generalization ability. Secondly, the medical field is rich in terminology and domain knowledge but often complex, which requires effective integration of this knowledge into prompts. Additionally, different medical tasks require different prompt designs, which requires balancing the complexity and interpretability of prompts while also utilizing existing medical domain knowledge to guide the model to generate high-quality predictions. Finally, the prompt design also needs to consider how to avoid introducing human bias or erroneous information to ensure the fairness and accuracy of the model.
It should be noted that NLP tasks in the medical field are highly challenging as they involve a large amount of domain knowledge and specialized terminology, which may not be easily understood or processed by general NLP models. Therefore, the importance of prompt engineering in the medical field is self-evident. With the emergence of multimodal information in the medical field, combining multiple modalities such as text, images, and speech can better address practical problems in the medical domain. Additionally, conducting multi-task research by integrating multiple medical research tasks can provide better services for clinical healthcare.
Prompt engineering is revolutionizing the healthcare industry with limitless potential. By investing in prompt engineering and understanding its implications, organizations can position themselves as leaders in the industry and ensure they are prepared for the future. The possibilities are endless, and the benefits are profound; it’s time to embrace prompt engineering and unlock its full potential for the betterment of healthcare.