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A comment on Ask HN: Has anyone successfully pivoted from web dev to AI/ML development?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Has anyone successfully pivoted from web dev to A... by willsmith72 on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @12:40PM (#40867663)
I want to agree with this, but after reading the whole article, I have no idea what the skills of an AI Engineer are.

Why is that not the job of a software/product engineer?

> none of the highly effective AI Engineers I named above have done the equivalent work of the Andrew Ng Coursera courses, nor do they know PyTorch, nor do they know the difference between a Data Lake or Data Warehouse

they're explicitly not trained in ML/AI. any software engineer can write a good prompt, call an API, and deploy that on an http server.

why is that not just software/product engineering?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Has anyone successfully pivoted from web dev to A... by demosthanos on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @02:16PM (#40868606)
An AI engineer wires up APIs to each other and returns the result as JSON, the same process as any other web dev.

Like any other web dev job there are differences across domains that can make it valuable to hire someone with past experience in your particular industry (in this case LLMs), but the only reason this gets a brand new title and others don't is hype.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Has anyone successfully pivoted from web dev to A... by trunch on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @03:28PM (#40869235)
So much less complicated than your average web developer job in 2024?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Has anyone successfully pivoted from web dev to A... by demosthanos on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @04:42PM (#40869784)
If you're only doing backend AI work, yeah, probably.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Has anyone successfully pivoted from web dev to A... by simonw on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @04:18PM (#40869600)
It basically IS just software/product engineering. An AI engineer is a product engineer who's ahead of the curve from everyone else in terms of building on top of LLMs and similar.

It might not even still be a speciality in a few years time. Right now though there's a lot of depth to the field that people who aren't focusing on it are missing out on.

[ Parent | on HN ]