How did 'prompt engineering' become a real job practically overnight?

The answer

Prompt engineering - the practice of crafting inputs to elicit optimal outputs from AI models - emerged as a distinct discipline around 2022-2023 as organizations discovered that small changes in phrasing could dramatically alter model performance. Techniques like chain-of-thought prompting (proposed by Wei et al. in January 2022) improved GPT-3's accuracy on math word problems from 18% to 57%. Job postings for 'prompt engineers' surged in 2023, with some positions offering salaries exceeding $300,000. The field encompasses techniques from few-shot examples and role-playing to structured formats like ReAct and Tree-of-Thought reasoning.