[kamaal]

>>People want to be become machine learning engineers because it's the ... thing right now, but they don't want to learn the necessary statistics/linear algebra/optimization necessary for the roles.

Most people who will do these jobs, will stitch libraries into producing an application, like every other programming job. They will need passing knowledge of things, but only make things work.

This is for the same reasons why anyone build an web app is not writing their own TCP/IP stack and their own operating system.

As a matter of fact I wouldn't be surprised, If most people who are claiming to do AI are just writing SQL queries to get Averages and means.

In the hey days of Big data craze, people were using Hadoop and Pig to deal with files a few kilobytes in size, and calling it 'Big Data'.