Career CloseUp: Expert-Vetted (Top 1% of Upwork) AI & Prompt Engineer

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Transcript

00:00:00:02 - 00:00:01:00 Hi, I'm Greg Schwartz.

00:00:01:00 - 00:00:03:02 I'm an AI and Prompt Engineer.

00:00:03:02 - 00:00:06:12 So a regular day for me is a combination

00:00:06:12 - 00:00:10:23 of going on Upwork to pitch new clients and also respond

00:00:10:23 - 00:00:14:03 to clients that have pitched me or requested a proposal for me,

00:00:14:07 - 00:00:18:06 as well as spending a lot of time using ChatGPT

00:00:18:08 - 00:00:22:09 and writing prompts to try and get it to give me the output that I need.

00:00:22:11 - 00:00:24:01 Lately, I'm actually doing a lot of work

00:00:24:01 - 00:00:27:14 with something called Pinecone, which is a vector storage database

00:00:27:16 - 00:00:33:07 that allows you to basically hand larger amounts of data to work on.

00:00:33:09 - 00:00:36:05 So then I've been doing a lot of testing of that as well.

00:00:36:05 - 00:00:39:20 Other days, work that I'm doing is more focused on

00:00:39:20 - 00:00:41:18 just integrating with other API.

00:00:41:18 - 00:00:45:11 So there might be a tool that I'm going to use or some project

00:00:45:13 - 00:00:48:18 that I'm going to send a query to, and then it's going to respond

00:00:48:18 - 00:00:51:18 with some text or image or whatever the case may be.

00:00:51:22 - 00:00:55:14 And so I'm just writing code to talk to this API, use

00:00:55:14 - 00:00:59:21 the API response, maybe stored in a database or CSV or J file or whatever

00:01:00:02 - 00:01:02:20 the case may be. So one surprising thing for sure,

00:01:02:20 - 00:01:06:12 because everybody talking about, you know, robots are going to take your jobs.

00:01:06:12 - 00:01:10:06 It's going to be Skynet, Terminator, all that stuff.

00:01:10:08 - 00:01:12:19 We're a really, really long way off from that.

00:01:12:19 - 00:01:17:06 All of the work that I'm doing right now takes a lot of time to build

00:01:17:06 - 00:01:21:04 an AI tool, and it will do something very, very specific.

00:01:21:04 - 00:01:22:18 Now, I do think something

00:01:22:18 - 00:01:25:23 that is definitely coming along is people who refuse to use A.I.

00:01:25:23 - 00:01:29:05 tools are going to be supplanted by people who do use A.I.

00:01:29:05 - 00:01:30:19 tools. You're going to see a lot of that.

00:01:30:19 - 00:01:32:09 And the people using A.I. tools,

00:01:32:09 - 00:01:36:19 yeah, one person can do the work of two, three, four, maybe even ten,

00:01:36:20 - 00:01:38:08 depending on the job.

00:01:38:08 - 00:01:43:05 You definitely want to learn these tools, but I would not be concerned about robots

00:01:43:08 - 00:01:44:05 taking over the world

00:01:44:05 - 00:01:48:23 and destroying humanity or, you know, losing your job tomorrow.

00:01:49:01 - 00:01:51:05 It's the kind of thing you need to work on it,

00:01:51:05 - 00:01:55:11 but you've got months, maybe even years, depending on your specific field.

00:01:55:13 - 00:01:59:15 So my career journey is definitely not a straight line.

00:01:59:17 - 00:02:01:21 Growing up, I knew I wanted to work with computers.

00:02:01:21 - 00:02:02:21 That was no question.

00:02:02:21 - 00:02:05:01 I knew that from when I was like ten.

00:02:05:01 - 00:02:07:13 I actually, at the end of undergrad was like,

00:02:07:13 - 00:02:09:09 I don't want to go to grad school.

00:02:09:09 - 00:02:11:23 I want to just work as an Engineer.

00:02:11:23 - 00:02:13:17 And I'm very happy with that.

00:02:13:17 - 00:02:18:11 And then after a few years of working, I had actually learned about design

00:02:18:11 - 00:02:22:05 and some other stuff, and said, okay, I do want to go into this.

00:02:22:10 - 00:02:28:15 I do want to go to grad school and switch to become a User Experience Designer.

00:02:28:17 - 00:02:29:13 AI was something

00:02:29:13 - 00:02:33:21 I did study a little bit in undergrad and in grad school, but very, very little.

00:02:33:21 - 00:02:37:12 And AI in that is frankly what most people would call Machine Learning,

00:02:37:12 - 00:02:40:23 even though they aren’t. You know, look for patterns in photographs

00:02:40:23 - 00:02:44:00 and things like that that are so massively different from what

00:02:44:00 - 00:02:49:00 we're doing with ChatGPT that most people actually think it's not AI.

00:02:49:01 - 00:02:51:15 I really had no expectation to ever work in AI,

00:02:51:15 - 00:02:57:12 but when ChatGPT and the like came along, I was

00:02:57:14 - 00:03:00:15 1. Really concerned as a User Experience Designer,

00:03:00:15 - 00:03:04:03 because it's not going to be something that goes away immediately, but

00:03:04:03 - 00:03:08:12 it is definitely something that is going to be heavily affected by AI.

00:03:08:14 - 00:03:12:02 And also, frankly, I was really excited about all of the different ways that

00:03:12:06 - 00:03:16:00 I can help lots of different people to do lots of different tasks, to make

00:03:16:00 - 00:03:19:03 their life easier, to make their work easier, just all of these things.

00:03:19:06 - 00:03:23:01 So that was why I started really going into it heavily

00:03:23:01 - 00:03:27:00 and eventually joined the consulting firm SynthMinds and started

00:03:27:00 - 00:03:28:22 working on Upwork and all of this stuff.

00:03:28:22 - 00:03:31:07 Yeah, because I was really excited about AI.

00:03:31:07 - 00:03:34:00 Undergrad was Information and Computer Science,

00:03:34:00 - 00:03:37:19 so it was Programing and Neural Networks and Machine Learning

00:03:37:19 - 00:03:39:03 and all of that different stuff.

00:03:39:03 - 00:03:42:12 So I definitely used what I learned in both undergrad and grad school

00:03:42:12 - 00:03:43:18 around programing, for sure.

00:03:43:18 - 00:03:47:06 To do all the programing I'm doing and frankly also

00:03:47:06 - 00:03:50:06 to kind of understand how to talk to ChatGPT.

00:03:50:12 - 00:03:54:13 Although I would say that coming more from grad school, which I studied, Human

00:03:54:13 - 00:03:57:04 Computer Interaction, which is User Experience Design,

00:03:57:04 - 00:03:58:15 and that's basically like

00:03:58:15 - 00:04:02:11 Computer Science, but also Cognitive Science and Psychology

00:04:02:12 - 00:04:06:10 and Design and Marketing and Sales, and a bunch of other stuff

00:04:06:10 - 00:04:07:16 too, that we don’t need to get into.

00:04:07:16 - 00:04:10:09 So yeah, that was, I think, much more helpful

00:04:10:09 - 00:04:12:17 for actually learning how to do the prompting part.

00:04:12:17 - 00:04:18:10 But doing the AI Engineering, it's all pretty conventional front end and back

00:04:18:10 - 00:04:22:07 end work. Front end to build a tool, back end to talk to the different AI

00:04:22:09 - 00:04:25:09 APIs and honestly, non AI APIs as well.

00:04:25:09 - 00:04:29:01 So if you want to get into working on AI, it would be great

00:04:29:04 - 00:04:32:14 to learn some programing, but it isn't required if you're okay

00:04:32:17 - 00:04:34:05 just working on Prompt Engineering.

00:04:34:05 - 00:04:36:03 If you want to work on actual Engineering,

00:04:36:03 - 00:04:38:09 yeah, you've got to know programing languages.

00:04:38:09 - 00:04:42:14 So if you want to work on AI, it would be very valuable

00:04:42:14 - 00:04:46:12 to learn programing, particularly if you are learning a new language.

00:04:46:12 - 00:04:47:20 I would start with Python.

00:04:47:20 - 00:04:51:08 It is the language that the most AI stuff is written in,

00:04:51:10 - 00:04:56:04 but if you know JavaScript or TypeScript that's heavily used as well,

00:04:56:08 - 00:05:00:08 honestly more for like the frontend interfaces for these AI tools,

00:05:00:08 - 00:05:02:03 but you're going to do a lot of work with that too.

00:05:02:03 - 00:05:03:04 And that said, you also

00:05:03:04 - 00:05:07:03 really don't need to learn programing if that's not something you're into.

00:05:07:03 - 00:05:10:03 If you're really more interested in the visual design side,

00:05:10:08 - 00:05:13:18 you could spend, you could you could have a very good career

00:05:13:20 - 00:05:16:16 just doing image prompting and things around that.

00:05:16:16 - 00:05:21:13 And all you're doing is working with text prompts and in some cases image input too.

00:05:21:13 - 00:05:22:12 But that's another subject.

00:05:22:12 - 00:05:24:11 Same thing for a text generation like ChatGPT, Bing, Bard,

00:05:24:11 - 00:05:27:06 all of those.

00:05:27:06 - 00:05:29:20 You could do that without any programing knowledge.

00:05:29:20 - 00:05:33:02 But yeah, if you really want to go into working on AI,

00:05:33:04 - 00:05:35:21 that will be very helpful to actually know how to code.

00:05:35:21 - 00:05:36:14 I don't know,

00:05:36:14 - 00:05:39:01 I think it's probably like close to ten years ago

00:05:39:01 - 00:05:43:12 I tried using it for design and got nowhere and then when the AI

00:05:43:13 - 00:05:47:20 thing happened, I came back to Upwork and started getting jobs really fast.

00:05:47:22 - 00:05:50:22 So it was like really massive difference.

00:05:50:22 - 00:05:54:00 I think my first AI project actually, an AI project,

00:05:54:00 - 00:05:57:07 it was like somebody wanted a YouTube video where they

00:05:57:09 - 00:06:01:22 like you walk through how to do image prompting and generating.

00:06:01:22 - 00:06:03:01 I don't remember what it was,

00:06:03:01 - 00:06:05:21 but some kind of document based on those images.

00:06:05:21 - 00:06:11:14 So it was AI work sort of kind of, but it wasn't like really hardcore

00:06:11:16 - 00:06:14:21 coding or even Prompt Engineering really.

00:06:14:23 - 00:06:20:06 But that was enough to, you know, once I had one job,

00:06:20:06 - 00:06:23:13 it was much easier to get the second job and then to get the third job

00:06:23:13 - 00:06:28:09 and the fourth job and like, I guess that that would be some advice I would have

00:06:28:09 - 00:06:33:10 is don't worry as much about your rate or even like how really relevant

00:06:33:10 - 00:06:37:19 the project is at first, get one or two or three projects

00:06:37:19 - 00:06:42:03 under your belt, and you're honestly not getting paid that much.

00:06:42:03 - 00:06:45:21 And it's maybe not totally relevant, but then it's enough that you stand out

00:06:45:21 - 00:06:49:18 from all the other people that have zero and you've got one,

00:06:49:18 - 00:06:53:04 you've got two, like not really, you know, brings you up in the rankings.

00:06:53:07 - 00:06:54:23 So one last thing to add,

00:06:54:23 - 00:06:57:04 AI is going to be useful for everyone.

00:06:57:04 - 00:07:01:12 If you're, I don't know, a cook, you can use it to brainstorm recipes

00:07:01:12 - 00:07:06:13 and to maybe brainstorm copy to go in your restaurants websites.

00:07:06:15 - 00:07:10:03 If you're doing sales, you can certainly use it for writing

00:07:10:05 - 00:07:11:14 emails to clients

00:07:11:14 - 00:07:12:07 and obviously you're

00:07:12:07 - 00:07:16:00 going to need to check it over because it will occasionally do really bad output,

00:07:16:02 - 00:07:18:19 but it will speed up your process massively.

00:07:18:19 - 00:07:24:02 Project Managers again, email's a great one, but also brainstorming around

00:07:24:07 - 00:07:25:23 how can you make this project go faster?

00:07:25:23 - 00:07:31:22 How can we get rid of some of the roadblocks for that matter, even just asking,

00:07:32:00 - 00:07:33:03 here is a roadblock.

00:07:33:03 - 00:07:36:03 Here's a sentence or two of context about the project,

00:07:36:09 - 00:07:37:20 give me suggestions

00:07:37:20 - 00:07:41:08 and it will actually do a pretty good job of giving you a bunch of ideas,

00:07:41:10 - 00:07:43:11 most of which you will probably have thought of

00:07:43:11 - 00:07:47:20 because you're a Project Manager without however many years of experience.

00:07:47:22 - 00:07:50:11 But then it'll usually give you a couple that you’re like

00:07:50:11 - 00:07:53:07 I hadn’t thought of that, that's a good idea.

00:07:53:07 - 00:07:54:11 And again,

00:07:54:11 - 00:07:59:13 pretty much everybody writes email, so it is phenomenal for composing emails

00:07:59:13 - 00:08:03:04 when you're stuck, for rewriting emails into a different tone.

00:08:03:06 - 00:08:07:09 So you can take an email to say your boss or your coworker 00:08:07:09 - 00:08:10:12 or your client or whoever, where you're pretty

00:08:10:12 - 00:08:13:12 frustrated and say, okay, please

00:08:13:12 - 00:08:18:10 rewrite this into a formal positive tone and ChatGPT will do a great job.

00:08:18:16 - 00:08:22:08 So it can be somewhat of your emotional filter in some cases as well.

00:08:22:08 - 00:08:27:04 So something I'm proud of, it's very random, but I am also a fire dancer.

00:08:27:06 - 00:08:31:12 If you've been to Hawaii or New Zealand or other places, you've probably seen

00:08:31:12 - 00:08:36:14 like a luau and seen people spitting fire usually at the end of chains.

00:08:36:16 - 00:08:39:16 And I've been doing that for about 13 years.

00:08:39:21 - 00:08:43:05 And one of my biggest performances, we think the crowd

00:08:43:05 - 00:08:45:15 was around 3 to 5,000 people.

00:08:45:15 - 00:08:51:13 It was a duet I did with another person that I know, and it was amazing.

00:08:51:13 - 00:08:55:15 It was incredibly stressful and I had massive stage fright

00:08:55:17 - 00:08:58:17 and it turned out nobody in the audience could tell

00:08:58:21 - 00:09:02:09 because I asked once I got off and lots of friends in

00:09:02:09 - 00:09:05:23 the audience were like, No, you did great and couldn't tell anything was going on.

00:09:06:01 - 00:09:08:07 So yeah, pretty proud of that.