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Comment by jakeinspace | Hacker News Reader

I’m assuming that "AI research engineer" implies a PhD, but I’m curious what your progression was. How long were you in academia before moving to industry research?

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4 year BSc + 1 year MSc. Experience matters much more than having a PhD. Lots of people without phds at the big ai research labs as engineers. I’d say it’s uncommon for engineers to have phds (although almost all have masters).

Do folks still expect you to keep up with research papers as an ML engineer?

Yeah, you should be familiar with the state of the art in your field. You don’t need to be as strong with theory though as Research Scientists.

I’m a web dev and I’m wondering if there is really any practical way of levelling up to become an ML Engineer. Seems there are ‘schools’ out there but based on what I read on Hacker News these places won’t remotely prepare me to make that transition.

Not complaining just would appreciate some of your thoughts on what are good options to consider to make that leap.

TBH the code behind generative stuff is "fairly" simple, I made a GAN for my Masters degree back in 2019 that produced 16x16 tile assets for x-bit styled videogames. The rough part is CREATING the math that supports the learning models, its very easy to implement it after the fact. If you have a strong data structure foundation, and are decent with math then it shouldn't be a hard transition to pick up ML. It's the flavor of the year and everywhere you look schools are hustling for your money, can't say I've tried any of them/have an opinion of them so GL with that.

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