Ask HN: Is the LLM craze real? Or are companies just hyping it to fish for CVs?
We all read the news about company X,Y,Z (e.g. X=Microsoft, Y=Google, Z=OpenAI) spending a lot of $$$ on building hyped-up LLMs and hiring talent for that (to the detriment of other CS areas, where there is a happy cull going on :(). This obviously drives application numbers.<p>In particular, there are jobs that do not require  a mastery of a very large skillset, like prompt engineer (sorry, if I&#x27;m offending any prompt engineers out there), that yet offer a startking salary of 280k: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobs.lever.co&#x2F;Anthropic&#x2F;e3cde481-d446-460f-b576-93cab67bd1ed<p>This job has been online at Anthropic since more than 2 months now and I personally know someone who is a final-year PhD student in machine learning at a top-5 university, with publications at top conferences which were precisely on prompt engineering. You&#x27;d think that you can&#x27;t get a much better candidate - yet he didn&#x27;t get the job; he actually wasn&#x27;t even invited to do an online quiz or a first interview.<p>These anecdotes, the hype that companies push out as well as the fact that these jobs stay out there forever while the market is down for other CS jobs smell to me that companies are not really looking for talent, just for CVs. How do you see this?