[William_BB]

It depends on what "working on those problems" means to you. If you want to work on those problems as a software engineer, that sounds like an achievable goal.

To me, the interesting, fulfilling bits of building the next Google/ChatGPT/AI/climate change lie in the theory. Arguably with the exception of Kubernetes, this theory does not come from software engineering. As much as I enjoy software engineering, it's a trade. It's a tool to get the job done. And recently, I realized I like building things just as much as I like "the theory".

To me, that was a bitter pill to swallow. I'm not an ML engineer, but I suspect this is also the reason why you can find so many posts about ML engineers trying to pivot to ML scientist roles.