[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.