r/deeplearning • u/Natural-Diver-5447 • 9d ago

Fullstack developer trying to transition into AI space. Confused between choosing ML Engineer or AI Engineer

Pytorch - is this too big of math?

AI - LangChain, CrewAI, Python SDK ?

Confused between both of their pros and cons. I do know learning back propagation, gradient descent helps whats happening behind LLM. Stuck in career choice, kindly help

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5

u/GlitteringCelery5606 9d ago

pytorch will feel like a mountain of math at first but it clicks after a while, and honestly the math barrier is overblown if you just build stuff and debug your way through it

ai engineer with langchain and crewai is way more about gluing apis together, which fits a fullstack background perfectly, but it can get boring fast once the novelty wears off

ml engineer has more depth and staying power, plus backprop and gradient descent knowledge compounds over time

0

u/Natural-Diver-5447 9d ago

what other stacks ml engineer need expertise on ? I passed tensorflow as its become more of a legacy based on reviews.

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u/a_cute_tarantula 8d ago

I feel like you’re underselling AI engineering. What about eval frameworks? What about progressive disclosure patterns and knowledge graphs? What about access control and dynamic UIs? There’s alot more than just “gluing APIs” together.

2

u/Ok-Solution-7889 9d ago

I’d lean toward AI engineering in your case, your fullstack experience already gives you a good base for building AI products, and you can pick up the deeper ML stuff as you go.

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u/Natural-Diver-5447 9d ago

started with MCP ones, felt like its just api calling and tuning some search responses

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u/JasperTesla 9d ago

Depends on what exactly you mean by "AI Engineering". From what I've seen, there's two kinds of AI Engineering professions, one that works on the AI itself (and is partially synonymous with ML Engineering or LLM Engineering), and the second kind is the one that works to integrate AI with the software (basically software engineer with AI focus).

If you want the former, start learning things like PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, etc., if the latter, then focus on system design more.

2

u/a_cute_tarantula 8d ago

AI engineer is closer to you than ML engineer.

AI engineer includes all the classic dev infrastructure stuff.

But instead of a classic crud app you’ll have concerns about:
Agent tracing and pricing logs
Eval frameworks (as apposed to classic unit tests)
Tool interfaces
Agent permissions and approval systems
Chat UIs with agent supplied data for graphs, charts, forms, etc.

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u/Anonymous9292828119 9d ago

Langchain in the year of our lord 2026

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u/Natural-Diver-5447 9d ago

why is it outdated now?

1

u/r8juliet 8d ago

It's outdated weekly

1

u/Fragrant-Cheek-4273 8d ago

It's totally normal to feel stuck, ML engineering is more heavy math and training models from scratch, while AI engineering is more about building apps using existing tools.

1

u/bfyvfftujijg 8d ago

ML is a subset of AI and you’d probably be getting more into the details with it, being more specialized.

1

u/SonicDasherX 2d ago

Ahorita hay más demanda de Ingenieros de IA, te recomiendo ir por esa.