Home Speakers Shawn Wang (swyx) Quote There are 10x as many ML Engineer jobs as AI Engineer jobs on Indeed, but the higher growth rate of “AI” leads me to predict that this ratio will invert in 5 years.
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More from Shawn Wang (swyx) Essay The Rise of the AI Engineer Jun 30, 2023
Foundation Models are “ few shot learners ”, exhibiting in-context learning and even zero shot transfer capabilities that generalize beyond the original intent of model trainers. In other words, the people creating the models don’t fully know what they are capable of. Essay The Rise of the AI Engineer Jun 30, 2023
I think software engineering will spawn a new subdiscipline, specializing in applications of AI and wielding the emerging stack effectively, just as “ site reliability engineer ”, “ devops engineer ”, “ data engineer ” and “ analytics engineer ” emerged. Essay The Rise of the AI Engineer Jun 30, 2023
In the near future, nobody will recommend starting in AI Engineering by reading Attention is All You Need, just like you do not start driving by reading the schematics for the Ford Model T. Essay The Rise of the AI Engineer Jun 30, 2023
We are observing a once in a generation “shift right” of applied AI, fueled by the emergent capabilities and open source/API availability of Foundation Models. A wide range of AI tasks that used to take 5 years and a research team to accomplish in 2013, now just require API docs and a spare afternoon in 2023.
On the same topics Blog The Overhang Sep 18, 2026
In fact, the new GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1 are already enough for transformative impact in large sections of the economy and they can reliably do weeks worth of human work when properly guided and harnessed. Blog The Overhang Sep 18, 2026
Making great things with AI means knowing which AI outputs to keep, which to discard, and which to use as raw material for something the AI would never have generated on its own. Blog The Overhang Sep 18, 2026
My point is that, while there is a lot of debate over what future models will do, the current capabilities of existing models are barely being used, and are often not even well understood. Blog The Overhang Sep 18, 2026
The capability overhang, the gap between what these models can do and what almost anyone is doing with them, is an opportunity because most people don't bring their own advantages to AI, and those who do get much more out of it. Blog The Overhang Sep 18, 2026
You are not trying to compete with AI in producing outputs, that is a losing game. Instead, you want to use your human advantages as basis of working with AI to do things that neither of you could do alone. Blog I do not want your brains to rot Sep 17, 2026
Cognitive offloading is a strategic delegation that costs nothing. Cognitive surrender is something different; an uncritical abdication of reasoning itself. And there is something about AI, about its allure and potency, that could make surrender far more widespread. About this quote Said by Shawn Wang (swyx), Editor, Latent Space Where The Rise of the AI Engineer Topics Work Company Source latent.space/p/ai-engineer A quote is one moment, not the whole argument. Read it in context at the source.
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