How Can I Be An AI Engineer?

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2024-12-09 23:00:16

You want to be an AI Engineer? Do you even have the right skills? What do they do? All great questions. I’ve had this same conversation several times, so I figured it would be best to write it down. Here I answer all those, and break down the job into archetypes that should help you understand how you’ll contribute.

An AI engineer is a specialized software engineer that integrates GenAI models into applications. It can involve training or fine-tuning LLMs, but it often does not. It can involve working on low-level harnesses, like llama.cpp or vLLM, but it often does not.

More often AI engineering involves building UIs, APIs, and data pipelines. It can look wildly different from job to job. The common thread is that you send prompts to an LLM or image model, e.g. via OpenAI’s API, and use the result in an application somehow.

Seriously, you don’t typically need to have AI experience, it’s a new field so not many people actually have prior experience. It’s tempting to think machine learning (ML) expierience is helpful, but it’s actually often more of a liability to approach problems like a data scientist does.