[nl]

(I build machine learning models professionally)

* half the student interns I interview from top-20 comp sci programs do this on weekends for hackathons*

It's trivially easy to take what someone else has built and modify it slightly for a similar problem, especially in a hackerthon environment where you can ignore edge cases etc.

See if they can build a new model from scratch for a new type of problem. I'm not saying that AutoML can do this either, but I interview large numbers of PhDs who don't know where to start on doing something new.