With the advent of LLMs, multimodality and “general purpose” AIs which seat on unimaginable amounts money, computing power and data. I’m graduating and want to start a PHD, but feel quite disheartened given the huge results obtained simply by “brute-forcing” and by the ever-growing hype in machine learning that could result in a bubble of data scientists, ML researchers and so on.
I am not sure, I work in academia and we didn’t have this problem.
I suppose it is the backlash from the hype that started in 2015 when random companies started hiring data science teams and later realized they didn’t need them, but most notably the big tech companies fired many ML people at the end of the pandemic, which flooded the market with highly-skilled job-seekers and made it hard for newcomers up to this day, as far as I have been told.