What are ML jobs about? I have this vague notion that you spend a lot of time gathering/cleaning data and throwing things at the wall, but maybe that's not accurate.

I've always been stronger at discrete type math/programming, which is why I tend to shy away from statistics-based stuff like ML.

One thing to note is that LLMs are indeed feed forward, however the generation of the text (from my understanding) is recursive in that you feed each output token to another forward pass of the neural network.