what is an AI engineer?

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An AI engineer is a specialized software engineer who focuses on building and enhancing systems using artificial intelligence. The role can be divided into three types:

1. **AI Enhanced Engineer**: This engineer utilizes AI tools such as Copilot and Cursor to improve their coding efficiency. They integrate AI into their workflow to assist with writing code and solving problems [[01:11:31]].

2. **AI Product Engineer**: This type of engineer leverages AI capabilities to create products for end-users. They interact with foundation models and APIs provided by AI research labs but do not typically engage in pre-training or deep machine learning research [[01:11:35]] - [[01:11:48]].

3. **Non-Human AI Engineer**: This is a more futuristic concept where the engineer is not human. Instead, these are autonomous systems capable of writing and managing code independently. This type is considered the farthest from current reality due to the complexity involved [[01:11:53]] - [[01:11:57]].

The emergence of the AI engineer role marks a significant shift in the tech industry, with companies like Meta, IBM, Microsoft, and OpenAI already hiring for this position [[01:20:41]] - [[01:20:49]]. This trend reflects the growing importance of AI in software development and the need for specialized skills to build and maintain AI-driven applications.

Additionally, the number of AI engineers is expected to surpass machine learning engineers as the demand for AI-enhanced products continues to rise [[01:21:18]] - [[01:21:28]]. This new role will likely include both full-time positions dedicated to AI engineering and traditional software engineering roles that incorporate AI tasks part-time [[01:24:03]] - [[01:24:28]].

In summary, an AI engineer is a crucial and evolving role in the tech industry, involving a spectrum of responsibilities from enhancing existing software with AI to developing new AI-driven products and potentially leading to fully autonomous engineering systems in the future.