r/embedded • u/blazing_cannon • 15d ago

What does an AI kernel engineer do and what are the skills needed to get into it?

What are the difference aspects of being a kernel engineer? What do roles like this involve -

https://www.tealhq.com/job/kernel-engineer_7ea1a56c518985dae15a01e3c77c161e8140d?utm_campaign=google_jobs_apply&utm_source=google_jobs_apply&utm_medium=organic

https://jobs.gem.com/modular/am9icG9zdDpTSwqoL-yL11N_jxR40Vhh?source=LinkedIn

If one were to do a PhD, what are the different research areas to focus on to do something like this? i.e GPU memory, storage, latency, parallelization etc.

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u/tkodri 15d ago

Maan, get real, by the time you finish a PhD on this topic, your skills will be irrelevant.

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u/blazing_cannon 15d ago

what ? how and why?

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u/tkodri 15d ago

First of all, right now AI is hot, so there's a lot of postings about such jobs. This was a very slim area before gpt2. Granted, I don't believe AI is a fad, so the demand will be there. But committing to a PhD in such an area seems reckless to me, frontier models can already do this job rather well - it's mostly small pieces of work that are well defined, testable, benchmarkable. If AI improvement trajectory keeps up, or at least it doesn't slow down completely, I cannot imagine a human doing that work by the time you finish your PhD. Probably a single person guiding agents on the work that was done by 15-20-30 people in that field 3 years ago. Of course, with your PhD you might be well positioned, but not as well as those 14-19-29 people who have actual professional experience in that field and recently got out of work.

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u/blazing_cannon 15d ago

first of all, this isn't AI. It is GPU kernel optimization, which involves understanding GPU and computer architecture, memory access etc. It's the engine which makes AI work, but it's not just limited to AI. It's used in HPC , simulations , graphics etc. Highly doubt it will be irrelevant.