[captainbland]

A UK perspective on this is that the AI trend, as described in the article, would quickly turn into a class divide. Many employers in AI/ML spaces seem to want postgraduate degrees. Often the academic entry requirements to such degrees aren't that high (usually a bachelors degree with an "ok" mark like a 2:2 or a 2:1 min in a related subject - not exactly sky high attainment criteria) but the financial barriers are relatively severe - far poorer finance options are available as compared to undergraduate degrees especially.

The dynamic then seems to be that while software development has been functioning as a relatively effective source of social mobility, if you can do the work you can create a decent career, the current AI wave threatens to pull up the ladder for many if this trend carries on as described.

That said I'm not too worried about it playing out like that yet, at least not in the medium term. I think industry is at some pinnacle of optimism around AI but don't quite realise that it's not a great fit for a lot of commercially relevant use cases like maintenance of existing code bases of more than trivial complexity and it's unlikely to be for a good while and where there is sensitivity to copyright. I think once that reality sets in there will be some degree of back-peddling.

[ilaksh]

I don't see it quite like that. It may be true that many employers are looking for postgrads. I don't know. But since practically _every single company_ large or small wants to know how or if they can take advantage of AI right now, there are plenty of opportunities to go around for anyone who has any knowledge or skills in generative AI.

And by far the most deployed technologies, even for postdocs, are going to be basically off-the-shelf or somewhat fine-tuned existing models via API or tooling being used for text and/or image generation for specific applications. In other words, things that in no way require the degree. That isn't to say that having real machine learning specialists isn't desirable, but there is plenty of room for people who just know how to apply the tools rather than invent new ones.

Actually there are plenty of "academic" papers coming out from people with advanced degrees that are mainly just applying GPT-4 to write code in some DSL to solve some category of problem. That stuff doesn't even require basic understanding of neural network architectures.

The latest models are so powerful it seems to be having a democratizing effect rather than increasing the class divide. From my perspective.

[anyoneamous]

> the financial barriers are relatively severe

Anyone taking out loans for a PhD in the UK is a fool. Not only are our PhDs generally less well regarded than those from the EU and US, but there is also an abundance of grant funding available. If you can't get paid as part of a grant (and hence have fees taken care of) for a PhD here, then either the field of study has little economic value, or you are not considered good enough.

[Hermitian909]

The reason why AI/ML spaces want postgraduate degrees is because there is a massive glut of candidates relative to openings. One of the things we realized over the past decade is that if you are not in the business of hiring AI researchers even companies with >1,000 SWEs may need only a dozen ML experts.

Even at fairly mature companies, fully utilizing a top tier ML expert may require the equivalent of 6-10 SWEs.

Anyway, while no one knows what the future holds, right now it doesn't seem like many companies are looking to actually take on AI as a core capability, they're looking to leverage open source tools. I'm at a large company right now that's betting pretty heavily on AI and we're thinking of bringing on 1 maybe 2 ML specialists over the next year. My friends at other large tech firms report similar plans.