Stupid question: Is there any chance that I, as an engineer, can get away from l... | Hacker News
Parallel question: I work as a Data Engineer and always wonder if it's possible to get into MLE or AI Data Engineering without knowing AI/ML. I thought I only need to know what the data looks like, but so far I see every job description of an MLE requires background in AI. A "background in AI" is a bit silly in most cases these days. Everyone is basically talking about LLMs or multimodal models which in practice haven't been around long. Sebastian Raschka has a good book about building an LLM from scratch, Simon Prince has a good book on deep learning, Chip Huyen has a good book on "AI engineering". Make a few toys. There you have a "background". Now if you want to really move the needle... get really strong at all of it, including PTX (nvidia gpu assembly, sort of). Then you can blow people away like the deep seek people did... How can I leverage that experience into earning the huge amounts of money that AI companies seem to be paying? Most job listings I've looked at require a PhD i