There are many routes to making money with ChatGPT as a prompt engineer. Let’s examine three!
The Ugly Route #1 – Create Massive Amounts of Garbage Content 🧌
The obvious way is to use it to create massive amounts of content.
As a Python prompt engineer, you can create a pipeline that crawls webpages, passes them as embeddings into GPT-4 Turbo with a huge context window of 128k tokens, and ask it to create articles based on the input and its knowledge.
Then, monetize these articles with ads.
However, I don’t think this is the best way – it’s very crowded!
And why bother? It adds little value to the world.
Because everybody is doing it, most won’t make money this way.
So let’s move on:
Route #2 – Create Quality Content 👹
A much better route.
You can use AI to do research and help you obtain, analyze, and visualize data.
Code interpreter and GPTs can help you enrich your content. Use ChatGPT to fix grammar mistakes and improve clarity.
The Internet is a winner-takes-most market. In other words, increasing your content quality just a tiny bit can double your reach.
Want to double your reach again? Increase the quality of your content even more!
Mister Beast teaches us that it never ends.
Due to the winner-takes-most dynamics, investing human time in content quality pays off in the long term.
The opposite is also true: you should definitely use AI to enrich your content with unique insights or tools.
For instance, a human chess player guiding a chess AI will beat both, an expert chess player without AI, and a chess AI without guiding humans.
For that reason, AI-enriched human content is a sustainable route to leverage AI to make money and have a real positive impact.
Route #3 – Sell Your Consulting Services 🧑💻
Still – both routes #1 and #2 are very crowded and it takes years of daily effort just to get the foot in the door.
You need to love the game, or you won’t make it through the years of unpaid work. The content creation market is brutal and if you see small success, you’ll get copied very quickly.
Moreover, content creation doesn’t pay off quickly – successful content creators give it their all for many years before reaching good income levels.
It’s not easy. You must become an expert.
An easier route in my opinion — higher expected value and a priori success probability — is to help businesses integrate alien technology into their existing business systems.
The LLM paradigm shift has not yet trickled into the “normal” world. Millions of businesses still need to integrate generative AI in their workflows.
We are in year #1 of publicly available LLM APIs.
Even without considering likely improvements of the foundational models, it’ll take years to connect and integrate LLMs with real world business systems.
Who Pays for AI Consultants?
Architects, financial advisors, grocery stores, software companies, restaurants, clothing stores, laundromats, bookstores, fitness centers, daycare centers — all of them can and eventually will improve efficiency, i.e., maximize benefit/cost ratio, by integrating LLMs into their workflows.
As an exercise to train your business savvy, feel free to take a minute to come up with little ways to use generative AI and LLMs to improve each of these businesses!
Think small.
Some minor examples:
- If you run a hair salon, can you delight your customers by using the Midjourney /merge command to experiment with personalized hair pictures of your customers?
- If you run a small factory, can you use OpenAI’s text-to-speech (TTS) library to welcome customers at the front door?
- If you are a financial advisor, can you delight your clients by using LLMs to enrich portfolio analysis or visualize your clients’ portfolios?
- As a solar company, can you fully automate offer creation by means of a fine-tuned LLM?
AI consultants on Upwork make $100 per hour and more. Why? Because of the huge leverage they offer to normal businesses that just don’t know how to do these things.
If you are such a business owner, hiring an AI consultancy for three hours could increase your customer satisfaction and revenue by 10%, 20%, or even 100%!
Who wouldn’t spend a few hundred bucks on that bet?
Moreover, to reduce perceived risk and boost revenue, creative AI consultants can propose revenue-share models where local businesses don’t need to pay upfront – but only an agreed-upon percentage of increased revenue after success.
In that case, the average hourly rate could be much higher, as the AI consultants would get a stake in the businesses.
Consider what I wrote a couple of emails ago:
“I’d rather hire one skilled prompt engineer than ten graphic designers”
The same would apply to 50/50 partnerships.
This opportunity is massive for anybody who wants to be on the right side of change. Collectively, there’s orders of magnitude more revenue in serving businesses than in content creation.
Scalability and passivity can be obtained through creative partnerships.
For example, boosting revenue by 20% of a business making $50k/m can increase business value by $100k to $500k. Many small businesses in your local environment have these revenue levels.
And who knows, there may be a possibility to scale up the consultancy to a more scalable Saas business to take it to the next level?
Be on the right side of change! 🚀
Chris
🔗 Original Publication in my newsletter (December 02nd, 2023). Join us free!