[lossolo]

> as in reality many of them were just using some basic ML models and calling it ground breaking AI to hype investors and potential hires

Without Phd in ML your chances for any leading AI company to hire you to work on SOTA ground breaking models as researcher are near zero, unless you are fine with devops/support roles. As to normal work of ML engineer on not ground breaking stuff it's actually really boring. You’ll spend a lot of your time just collecting + massaging data, slightly tweaking parameters to see tiny incremental improvement in your model.