Said Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist.

Yann LeCun is considered one of the godfathers of AI along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. LeCun recently spoke with the BBC at a Meta press junket in Paris.

I also think AI won’t destroy jobs forever and will spur the creation of new and different kinds of jobs in the future. In fact, we’re already seeing this.

ChatGPT Invents New Jobs

ChatGPT’s popularity and pluggability has already created new jobs.

Prompt engineering is a career path that’s so new and undefined the first prompt engineers are being paid up to $375,000 a year. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT require careful and clever instruction to get the most out of them. Prompt Engineers are people who know how to instruct models like ChatGPT to successfully accomplish tasks.

What’s amazing about this career path?

No technical skills are necessary to be effective prompt engineers. A background in clear communications and logical thought are the most significant job requirements. Anthropic is an AI safety and research company currently hiring prompt engineers. Here’s a snippet from one of their job postings:

a library of high quality prompts or prompt chains to accomplish a variety of tasks, with an easy guide to help users search for the one that meets their needs

Anthropic Prompt Engineer Role

What also amazing in this new frontier? You can learn prompt engineering now:

AI and other machine learning models are always thirsty for new data. New data items requiring human labeling in order to build accurate models.

AI Data Labeling is a new career path created by companies training advanced data models. These positions can vary in specialization, but most positions hover around $43k a year as a starting salary. This is another position that doesn’t require technical training. It’s a little lower than the US median salary of $53k a year, but positions you in an industry that has growth potential.

A Brave New World

Right now, we’re in a moment of uncertainty. These technologies are brand new and we still haven’t figured out best practices. Defaulting to doom and gloom is human nature because we can’t predict the future. AI has a large potential to be like any other technical revolution. It’ll cause early disruption and result in an expansion of opportunities and careers.

We just have to weather these beginnings.