[Der_Einzige]

Citation needed on "competition is brutal right now".

I'm seeing folks with their first and only workshop paper at an ACL track conference landing 150K offers starting at no-name startups. Some of these folks are not even 20 yet. Workshop papers are considered "easy" to publish, and are held in lower regard compared to main conference publications.

If it's "brutal" to compete against folks like this, I think a lot aren't cut out for this field.

[treprinum]

There aren't that many folks who publish even workshop papers. Most folks are scared of academics and hope to raze their way to ML just with dev skills which is unlikely to work as they won't be able to grasp the concepts they need to implement, especially if they work on anything <2 year old. $150k is also on the low end.

[jampekka]

There's plenty of demand for doing ML just by calling OpenAI or similar APIs as more or less total black boxes. Probably moreso than for designing and training your own models. And even then it's mostly taking a pretrained model from huggingface and doing fine-tuning and prompt churn by trial and error.

E.g. doing or hosting state-of-the-art LLMs is more or less infeasible for many/most use cases. (Applying LLMs succesfully for many/most use cases is probaly fundamentally infeasible, but that doesn't mean you can't get paid doing them anyway.)

[treprinum]

Those jobs are quickly getting commoditized - you can see it e.g. on TopTal where these types of jobs had $150/h last year and $60/h this year. But jobs like "create a framework for interpretable transformers based on some DeepMind research" are still at $250/h.