The Federal Aviation Administration has given final approval to SpaceX to conduct the first orbital flight test of the Starship. TO Ars TechniqueThe FAA issued a license to the company late Friday to launch a next-generation rocket from South Texas. “Following a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined that SpaceX complies with all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration, and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency said in a statement. “The license is valid for five years.”

As of Friday SpaceX said it will attempt the long-awaited test on Monday morning, with the launch window opening at 7am local time. TO Ars Technikas Eric Berger, Monday’s launch attempt forecast looks perfect, with moderate winds and clear skies expected. If SpaceX cancels the test, the company has backup options available on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Reaching this point has been a long journey for SpaceX. In addition to all the technical hurdles that had to be overcome, the FAA conducted a comprehensive environmental assessment of the company’s Boca Chica facility. Located near the Gulf of Mexico, the launch site is surrounded by wetlands that are home to hundreds of thousands of waders. Last June, the FAA provided SpaceX with a list of 75 actions it needed to take to protect the local wildlife around the facility. Now that all of that has been ironed out, the company needs to worry about any remaining technical issues affecting Starship.

A A new kind of AI job is emerging that pays six figures and doesn’t require a computer engineering degree or even advanced coding skills.

With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, many companies are now looking for “fast engineers” tasked with teaching new AI tools to provide more accurate and relevant answers to questions that real people might ask.

Some of these jobs can even pay up to $335,000 a year.

READ MORE: Artificial intelligence from A to Z

What does an operations engineer do?

Anna Bernstein, a 29-year-old operations engineer at Copy.ai, a generative artificial intelligence company in New York, is one of the few already working in this new field. Her role is to write text prompts that she uploads to the back end of the AI ​​tools so she can do things like create a blog post or sales email with the right tone and accurate information. To do this, she does not need to write any technical code; instead, she introduces instructions to the AI ​​model to help refine the answers.

“We operational engineers are few and far between, and for a long time I really felt like it was just me,” says Bernstein. She joined Copy.ai in September 2021, about a year before OpenAI’s ChatGPT went viral for its uncanny ability to create elegant texts and answer just about any question. “At the time, the term ‘fast engineer’ didn’t exist, and they weren’t sure if such a role could even exist.”

Bernstein, who studied English in college, was a copywriter and historical research assistant before becoming an operations engineer. “I didn’t have any technical background,” she says. “But to have a humanitarian background in this area seems like a triumph to me, especially since part of the point of developing AI is to mimic human thinking.”

A surge in jobs using AI

Operational design is currently considered one of the hottest tech jobs as companies look for ways to help train and adapt AI tools to get the most out of new large language models that may produce results that are not always correct or appropriate.

This is part of a surge in demand for workers who understand and can work with AI tools. According to LinkedIn data provided by TIME, the number of posts about “generative AI” has increased 36 times compared to last year, and the number of job postings containing “GPT” has grown by 51% between 2021 and 2022. these job postings are for everyone, even those with no background in computer science or technology.

It’s still too early to tell how big rapid design will become, but a number of companies and industries are starting to recruit for these positions. Anthropic, a Google-backed artificial intelligence startup, is announcing a salary of up to $335,000 for a “quick engineer and librarian” in San Francisco. Applicants must “have a creative hacker spirit and love to solve puzzles”. listing states. Klarity’s automated document reviewer is offering up to $230,000 for a machine learning engineer who can “guide and understand how to get the best results” with AI tools.

Beyond the world of technology, Boston Children’s Hospital and consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton recently advertised for engineering jobs, with the latter paying up to $212,000 to applicants with more than three years of machine learning model implementation experience. Actor Donald Glover even wants to hire an engineer and animator to join his team. new creative studio.

But despite the nickname “engineer” in the job title, Bernstein says he doesn’t consider himself fully an engineer. “When I first started, we tried to coin the term ‘hint specialists’,” she says. “Then came the term ‘hint engineer’ as a noun.”

How to become a fast engineer

Rob Lennon, rapid engineering specialist, began teaching for a fee online courses via Kajabi in December, designed to help the average person learn the skills needed to work in the field. His two courses, which have already been taken by about 2,000 students, demonstrate how to format and structure hints for different types of problems and subject areas. “People are demanding this knowledge,” Lennon says. “It’s kind of like a first-mover advantage.” Courses start at $150 and can cost up to $3,970 for individual tuition and course certification.

But, on the other hand, some experts believe that the hype around engineering hints will die down as soon as AI becomes more powerful and can generate its own hints. Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, warns that those who want to become fast engineers should be aware that much is unknown about the future of the industry.

“It’s not clear if operational design will matter in the long run because AI programs are better at anticipating user needs and generating clues,” he says. “We also don’t know if special skills are needed for rapid development or if it just takes a lot of time spent with chatbots.”

And the high salaries currently offered may not last long. “This is a job that probably only 500 people can do right now, which is why there are such insane salaries,” says Lennon. “But in six months, 50,000 people will be able to do this job. The value of this knowledge today is higher than tomorrow.”

Mollick notes that those interested in learning this area should try experimenting with big language models like GPT+ and Bard to learn their own approach to tooltip development, rather than taking online courses. This is because AI systems change so quickly, and clues that work today may not work in the future. “What worries me is that people think there is a magical secret in the clues,” he says.

Karyn Kimbrough, chief economist at LinkedIn, says that given the high interest in AI jobs, employers may quickly find they need to compete with each other to hire talent to fill these new open positions, especially if they continue to focus on hiring candidates. with specific tasks. Degrees or past positions. “Given how late all of this is happening, it’s important to approach these newly developed roles with a skills-focused mindset, focusing on the actual skills needed to get the job done,” she says.

It may seem suspicious to some that tech companies are willing to hand out that kind of money during massive layoffs in the industry. But tech entrepreneurs who champion the power of artificial intelligence believe that rapid development has a chance to take off and shape the future of automation. “The most popular new programming language is English,” wrote Andrey Karpaty, former head of Tesla’s AI department. on twitter.

However, not everyone agrees that operational engineering will be in demand at the six-figure salary level with the small number of education requirements that are currently offered. The trend has also raised questions about why people with a liberal arts background get the same compensation as people with a technical background, Bernstein said. Her response: “Why not? If they make the same contribution to the product.”

Write Nick Popley at nik.popli@time.com.