[kokken]

I don't understand the framing of the assumption.

Was the data scientist role only about building NLP models? Are the LLms gonna build Churn prediction models? Tell the PM why stopping the A/B test halfway through is a bad idea? Push back on loony ideas of applying ML to predicting sales from user horoscopes?

Maybe the role is a bit tinier in scope than 10 years ago, but I see it as a good thing. If you looked at DS positions on job search sites the role descriptions would be all over the place, maybe now at least we'll see it consolidate.

[schnitzelstoat]

Exactly - in my company we had some NLP models in Customer Service (bag-of-words for classifying tickets) but everywhere else it was just classification or regression problems.

So yeah, the bag-of-words model got replaced with a chatbot several years ago (when chatbots were all the rage back in like 2017) and will probably get replaced again with an LLM-enhanced chatbot soon. But the meat and potatoes are those classification and regression models and they aren't going anywhere.