That is not how it works at all. You won't get hired if you don't have the academic pedigree in the first place. That means a completed Ph.D and good publications in good journals.
The demand for AI/ML will fast outstrip available talent. We'll be pulling students right out of undergrad if they can pass an interview.
I'm hiring folks off Reddit and 4chan that show an ability to futz with PyTorch and read papers.
Also, from your sibling comment:
> Maybe it is also a matter of location. I am in Germany.
Huge factor. US cares about getting work done and little else. Titles are honestly more trouble than they're worth and you sometimes see negative selection for them in software engineering. I suspect this will bleed over into AI/ML in ten years.
Work and getting it done is what matters. If someone has an aptitude for doing a task, it doesn't matter where it came from. If they can get along with your team, do the work, learn on the job and grow, bring them on.
Hired in industry. That's the opposite. I've had a friend who had to hide that they had a PhD to be hired...
For a plain SWE role a Ph.d might be a disadvantage here too, but for anything ML related it is mandatory from what I can see.
As someone who hired for this in general we'd use PhD (or maybe a Masters degree) as a filter by HR before I even saw them.
It's true that a PhD doesn't guarantee anything though. I once interviewed a candidate with 2 PhDs who couldn't explain the difference between regression and classification (which was sort of our "ok lets calm your nerves" question).
Almost all the time, they're shitty startups, where bankruptcy is a matter of time, run by overpromising-underdelivering grifter CTOs pursuing a get-rich-quick scheme using whatever is trendy right now -crypto, AI, whatever has the most density on the frontpage-.
That was a few years ago, though.
We've tried many time to work with CSIRO (the NSF of Australia) and it's fallen flat. They love impressive resumes and nothing else. I'm having a chat with their "Director of ML" who's never heard of the words "word2vec" or "pytorch" before. (And I'm a UX designer!)
I think at most corporate firms you'll end up running into more resume stuffers than people who actually know how to use ML tools.
Reminds me of Computer Security academic and professional pedigree where these people aren't even programmers
Chris Olah was at OpenAI but is now one of the founders of Anthropic but doesn't have any degree (he joined Google Brain after dropping out of his undergrad degree).
I think they are pretty exceptional though - most people on the ML team do AFAIK. Perhaps on the infrastructure side the backgrounds are different.