This is Jensen's speech to the graduates of the University of Taiwan class of 2023, commencement speech to the graduates. Jensen arrives at great timing to deliver the speech — a day after Nvidia's stock hit an all-time high. Nvidia currently plays a central role in creating the hardware infrastructure that drives the AI industry, and Jensen talks about the company's history and the strategic decisions they took along the journey that brought it to its position today in the industry - the speech is interesting in itself, definitely worth watching (link in the first response). What caught my attention were his comments about the professions that this industry produces. Jensen's perspective is particularly interesting in these contexts, because he has a broader historical perspective on the subject, perhaps more than anyone else. So these are the "professions of the future" (not so far away, according to the psychic pace at which this industry is advancing), with my interpretation of the essence of the profession to the best of my understanding:
- Data Engineers - Information Engineers. Information engineers will be responsible for designing, building and maintaining the information systems that underlie AI systems. The performance of the systems, usability, accuracy and effectiveness of AI systems is based on the quality and structure of information and its processing. To some extent, you could say that AI "programming" is done by information, so information engineers will be the software engineers of AI systems.
- Prompt Engineering - These are people who will specialize in working with AI systems and know how to get the most out of them. We already see that in order to get the most out of AI engines such as Midgerney and ChatGPT, you need to know how to describe the requested output in a certain way and provide various data such as background and context in order to get the desired answer.
- AI Factory Operations - I hear this description for the first time. Since I trust that Jensen knows very well what operation is needed to run the AI infrastructure, I guess he already has a pretty clear vision of what an "AI farm" looks like and the need for people to operate it. Maybe it's the DevOps people (another profession born in recent years...) of AI systems or AiDevOps if you will. Anyone looking for AIDO?
- AI Safety Engineers – Unlike many industry executives, Jensen has not joined those calling for limiting or halting AI development and has not signed a single petition on the subject. As the head of a (traded) company that builds the infrastructure of this industry, one can also understand why he has no interest in doing so. Still, he does address here (indirectly) the dangers that AI systems bring, so much so that he predicts that safety in these systems will become a specialty and profession that people will be engaged in in the coming years.