Generative-AI chatbots—from top to bottom, Microsoft Bing, OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Bard—all start with you entering a prompt.

Enter 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.

And there’s a salary premium for the best whispering. 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. People I spoke with said they were seeing similar pay figures.

“We’ll have to wait to see the long-term effects of gen AI, but it’s clear right now that jobs related to the field are surging,” according to a recent report from Indeed.

Hear that? That’s the sound of a whole generation adding “proficient in prompt engineering” to its résumés.

Read more:

Stern, J. (2023, November 29). Talking to Chatbots Is Now a $200K Job. So I Applied.  Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/talking-to-chatbots-is-now-a-200k-job-so-i-applied-258bd5f0