The Hottest AI Job in the Year of Large Models is Now Outdated —
Prompt Engineer, no coding required, no specific major needed, no educational requirements, just research how to chat with AI, and earn an annual salary of $25-33k in 2023.
But now, it has become one of the positions that companies are least willing to expand.
A Microsoft survey involving 31,000 employees shows that Prompt Engineer has become the second-to-last position they want to add in the next 12-18 months.
Meanwhile, on the recruitment platform (Indeed), searches for Prompt Engineers have also experienced a roller coaster-like change.
- In January 2023, only 2 searches per million were for Prompt Engineers.
- In April 2023, this number surged to 144 searches per million.
- Now it has calmed down, maintaining around 20-30 searches per million.
It's worth noting that this new position was once endorsed by OpenAI's Altman and AI guru Kapathy.
After 2 years, understanding prompt engineering is still a skill, but the derived positions are no longer in high demand.
An executive in AI course training says:
Whether you're in finance, HR, or legal, understanding prompt engineering has become a basic professional skill, rather than requiring a dedicated position.
Prompt Engineering Has Become a Basic Necessity
Reviewing the current situation, the prompt engineering field now presents three new trends:
1. AI can automate prompt engineering
2. The entry barrier for ordinary people has lowered
3. Companies need more versatile talents
Initially, the job of a Prompt Engineer was defined as "using appropriate descriptions to maximize AI's potential".
The earliest AI companies to open this position included Anthropic, the creators of Claude.
In March 2023, they offered an annual salary of $25-33k for Prompt Engineers, with relatively abstract requirements including a hacker spirit, enjoying decryption, being good at communication, and able to clarify ambiguous questions.
The only hard requirements were basic programming and QA skills, and familiarity with large model architecture and operation.
But two years later, Prompt Engineers are no longer visible in Anthropic's recruitment.
They also launched a tool called Prompt Improver that can quickly optimize prompts.
It can automatically write or optimize prompts, helping developers quickly migrate from other models to Claude and further improve enterprise-level AI development efficiency.
Similarly, Google recently released a prompt engineering white paper, teaching non-technical users prompt engineering tricks.
This means that tech companies are lowering the barrier to prompt engineering through standardized tools, allowing even complete novices to handle basic prompt engineering issues using such tools/solutions.
From a more macro perspective, companies' demand for Prompt Engineers is generally decreasing.
A survey commissioned by Microsoft shows that Prompt Engineers have become one of the least desired positions to expand (second to last), with companies preferring to hire AI trainers, AI data specialists, and AI security experts.
The recruitment business director at HR company Xpheno states that the AI industry's demand for Prompt Engineers is gradually stabilizing, remaining almost flat globally over the past three quarters.
The market needs more versatile talents who understand prompt engineering.
For example, talents who are more familiar with foundational models, AI governance, data, and cloud computing. In the long run, demand for pure Prompt Engineers may gradually decrease.
However, at this stage, there are still job openings for Prompt Engineers in the market.
On recruitment platforms, companies still offering high salaries for Prompt Engineers are more concentrated in vertical industry fields or technical service providers serving vertical industries.
The Prompt Engineers they recruit also need to understand the industry better.
For instance, in Geling DeepSight's recruitment, they explicitly mention that the position requires in-depth understanding of government business knowledge.
In short, the Prompt Engineer position will not completely disappear in the short term.
But how long it can exist may depend on the speed of AI evolution.
In the Future, Everyone Will Need to Understand Prompt Engineering
Actually, when Prompt Engineers were booming, some pointed out the underlying logic of this position - AI is not smart enough.
At that time, large models' intelligence was limited and often required carefully designed prompts to give users the answers they wanted.
Two years later, even the then-strongest GPT-4 has been removed from ChatGPT by OpenAI, and the intelligence of large models is incomparable, no longer requiring perfect prompts to provide better answers.
Meanwhile, through simple interaction design, large models can more accurately understand user questions.
For example, the model will further ask questions to help users refine their needs.
Or it will automatically optimize the user's prompts, such as incorporating context and adding details.
Additionally, an unavoidable trend is that AI is developing towards more personalization.
As users interact more with AI, everyone can form their own knowledge base, and AI will become more like a personal assistant. At this point, AI will have a deeper understanding of users, and generic prompt engineering may become less useful.
Finally, AI is gradually penetrating everyone's daily work and life. Taking the domestic DeepSeek trend as an example, chatting with AI has become commonplace, and companies are embracing the AI wave and upgrading to a new round of intelligence.
It's almost foreseeable that in the future, people will use AI as casually as they use Office today.
So, do we still need to spend big money hiring Prompt Engineers?
Clearly, more comprehensive workers are more cost-effective (Doge).
What do you think?
Reference Links
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hottest-ai-job-of-2023-is-already-obsolete-1961b054?st=DMVDgm&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
[2]https://elpais.com/proyecto-tendencias/2025-04-23/se-necesita-experto-en-prompts-las-empresas-buscan-profesionales-que-sepan-hablar-con-la-ia.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com
This article is from the WeChat public account "Quantum Bit", authored by Ming Min, published by 36Kr with authorization.
