To those of you who are fascinated with AI, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), or looking to make a career move (aka make more $$) or both, welcome! This is the chronicle of my hopeful journey toward a career in prompt engineering. I wish to help others find their way into this field because the door may seem hidden. This also serves as my own documentation guide to the apps I will be testing and to be transparent, I feel the need to show some command of written English, so this blog becomes a little bit of my CV.
As context, I have no programming experience. I can read code and make sense of it, but cannot craft a widget or app (I’m considering trying to remedy this. Hmmm..wait, ChatGPT can generate code, muahahah!). Further, my tech background is in infrastructure and rather stale. So as you can see, I’m a rank beginner.
What piqued my interest in this field? First, I’ve always been excited by AI. Decades ago in college, I visited a lab partnered with NASA that was building a medical diagnostic application. It was yet a skeleton, but I was shown their huge flowchart of questions and potential responses—color me amazed! That impression lingered, so when snippets about ChatGPT started trickling out, I devoured every article, signed up at OpenAI and started poking around.
Then I read about this new field “prompt engineering” (PE). Involves AI, check. Make more money, check. Coding skills not necessary, check! From what I could gather, PE is about linguistics and logic. One has to understand how to frame and pose inputs (questions) in order to get valid, useful outputs (responses). This requires understanding not only my own language but also a Large Language Model’s (LLM) ‘thinking,’ which has a foundation in mathematics rather than semantics (correct me if I’m wrong). I can do this! 🤞🤞
Where to start looking into this exciting field? Get thee to:
Learn Prompting: Your Guide to Communicating with AI
Yup, that’s it for now. This field is so new, the curricula are few (but growing. I’ll post other educational resources on the Curricula page). Oh, don’t forget to join their Discord group. Lots of like-minded, generous, helpful folks there.
I’m almost finished going through the Learn Prompting material. It’s a lot to digest for a newbie. I may go over it again. Once done, then what?
Stay tuned.