The word "relevant" suggests that the only people who can possibly meet those qualifications are the authors of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need, which was published just about 9 years ago

Formal prompt engineering certification?

Lol. Lmao even

You can work much faster with AIs than is shown on wall clock time.

Just make sure that you’re working with 9 LLMs at once and you can get that 9 years experience in just one year.

Those must exist by now

From paper mills? Probably. Accredited? Unlikely.

Do that all on one machine for a year (because that's all you can afford that's powerful enough), see how much "experience" you accumulate.

Yeah none that I would respect, but I bet you could buy a qualification

We could go pretty far back depending on how you define it. We had less useful items that still could qualify in the same category as a modern LLM 7-8 years ago which gets us close... You could potentially stretch the definition to something like Megahal which is pushing pretty close to 30 years old.

It says "AI/LLM". so I guess they count non-llm as well. So they could probably count everything that uses a MLP, which have been around for some time.

Cisco has a prompt engineering course that counts for CE credits. I know because it was one of two free courses available that I used to recert recently. Welcome to hell.

Guess who wrote that job description

Do we really think those on the cutting edge of AI and LLMs a decade ago are applying for prompt engineer roles...with their mandatory prompt engineer cert.

Just ask chatgpt to make you one

That one "AI dungeon" videogame from like 2019 was using gpt2 and it was still better than current "exponentially improving" chatgpt at most things. Was just a bit more porn oriented that's all.

You had 3 prompts to nut before it just started giving Wikipedia articles.

There were technically ais back then. They just didn't do much and just spout nonsense sentences

I remember fucking with an image generator in 2021

Well, I wrote my first if in 1998...

EDIT: Actually, I think it was 1996

Well, my formal education is officially certified by the tar_alcaran Institute of super good paper signing. Which is all very formal and official.

But not accredited, because that would be illegal. It would meet their requirement though

Machine learning/LLM actually was around 10 years ago, it just didn't have the farcical "AI" moniker.

LLM?

Yeah.

The groundbreaking "Attention Is All You Need" paper, in which transformer architecture was proposed, was published 9 years ago. It was obviously part of a much longer running conversation around how to use linear algebra to find machine learning applications. If you're looking for someone who understands the underlying math and processes at a lower level, this isn't an unreasonable ask.

It is, however, an unreasonable ask of someone for a "prompt engineer" job though.

Ironically, I have literally implemented backpropagation from scratch like three separate times at this point (once before the famous CUDA impl) but I'd probably fail this interview for not knowing enough of the current agentic meta.

As a mobile dev, I remember seeing jobs early on that would have years of experience required that predated android/ios.

I was a PM and wrote specs, that's prompt engineering.

How many people working on that >9 years ago are applying for positions like this, though?

tbh, I'm not sure LLMs are that stupid.

Good thing I've used ELIZA my whole life.

Yeah, that kinda crap has been around for forever, I know I ran into these same types of HR written BS requirements back in the 2000 when I was searching for jobs and .NET and Java was the latest hotness, been out for just a few years and was running into job postings requesting 5 - 10 years of experience.

as much as i loathe llms, i feel like that kind of education is necessary nowadays. it should teach people how useless llms are.

It's ok though the people working the job rec (and lonely the people giving the interview) probably have zero clue what back propagation is

Well, actually, we've had the tech since the 80s

Calling them 'prompt engineers' has to be a real kick in the nuts to actual engineers.

Software engineer is still insulting to a lot of mechanical engineers

4,852

Just kidding, idfk

All engineers know that their specific field of work is the most important, most difficult and most complex type of engineering there is.

Most of them are wrong of course, because the aforementioned field is PLC design and programming. Which is coincidentally, what I do.

Idk I guess I didn't finish my degree but it felt very engineering focused, I'm not going to guess your knowledge but software engineers build systems that can basically do anything.

This might be the dissenting opinion but they do. My friend has a cert from CMU for Prompt Engineering.

Lots changed, huh

It's a way to technically remain a virgin in the eyes of The Lord.

Yes. You can look up videos like harry potter or Batman written by ai and it'll show you how they used to be.

really? I don't know anyone that feels that way. mechanical, mechatronics, and software are my closest friend groups.

maybe it's just that the additional professional qualification of engineer in my province adds a clear distinction between engineering graduate and professional engineer

I can see the xkcd comic for this

It says overall experience. Just say you worked two simultaneous AI jobs for the last five years and you're good!

Anyone that's completed an actual engineering degree/diploma knows that there is a significant difference between completing an engineering course and being an engineer. Unfortunately, there's lots of people that haven't done either and still use the name.

just have your ai manage ais and iy’s ais all the way down

Paper on artificial neural networks from 1943: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logical_Calculus_of_the_Ideas_Immanent_in_Nervous_Activity

That's more experience than Big Balls had to go through everyone's shit.