[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.