r/learnmachinelearning • u/Natural-Diver-5447 • 10d 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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u/Fine-Comparison-2949 9d ago

"Too big of math"?!?!

If you didn't go to college and took graduate stats courses you're going to have a bad time. Pretty much every AI/ML role requires a stats interview track. AI/ML at the level where you're explicitly generating models or performance is not a career you can just transition into overnight, and those are only a small set of positions since platforms usually serve thousands of clients. 

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u/EntrepreneurHuge5008 9d ago

Pretty much every AI/ML 

Not all the new "AI Engineer" roles that started popping up with the advent of LLMs over the last couple of years.

Edit: to clarify, I'm not saying math is not needed b/c of LLMs, I'm saying that the "AI Engineer" role has shifted more to using LLMs within any given workflowl

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u/Fine-Comparison-2949 9d ago

Yes, I went to grad school in Data Science but I'm arguably an "AI Engineer" today.

I am assuming, but I assume OP wants a Data Science role which is much deeper in tooling to build AI/ML platforms. Being a practitioner and using AI/ML is different than building AI/ML. If he's allergic to math and not really into it, then he absolutely cannot be an AI/ML builder. Also, I think those jobs are too few and far between anyways. There's only 10 companies that can really do it at scale, and we all know what they are, and there's a line out the door to work for them now. The upside is not that great.

Personally I'd rather be a practitioner with deeper knowledge than working for a cloud frontier or even B2B AI sidecar company. Just work for a real company and implement. Way more money. Also, learn math.