Ask HN: As a FAANG senior engineer, should I pursue a Masters Degree?

At present, I am a senior engineer at a FAANG company in Seattle, WA. I have about 9 years of experience and most of it has been at FAANG. I joined the company right after my under grad in CS.

I have been trying to break into a ML role for quite some time. In the past few years, I took several ML classes offered at my company and those really helped me get some useful hands-on experience with training/using ML models. With the recent LLM frenzy, I finally got an opportunity to build an Information Retrieval system which uses a few different neural models for search and although we got it out in production, I realized that a lack of formal background and prior experience in this area drew a lot skepticism from leadership and other teams towards the project. This was a pretty harsh reality check. In the past year, I have read about a hundred or so research papers and from what I understand, our project barely scratched the surface of whats possible and yet it was an annoyingly hard uphill battle to get it out.

For a long time I assumed that I would be able to build credible ML/AI expertise at work, but that seems less likely now. I also thought that I can self-teach ML/AI by working on personal projects, however, I doubt that would be true either given the depth of this field.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about pursuing a Masters Degree with a focus on learning ML and AI. I like this idea for following reasons:

1. A good MS program will help me build a solid foundation in this area and maybe even more.

2. If I am accepted at a university like Stanford, MIT or Harvard, it will give me access to their network and a degree from one of these institutes will help my career.

3. I can offset the opportunity cost of a mid-career break if I enroll in one their part-time MS programs that offer hybrid online/on-campus courses.

In the long term, I want to grow into a technical leadership role, preferably at a company that I co-founded.

I want your feedback on 1) whether doing a Master is even worth it at this stage in my career 2) are there other ways I can achieve the same goals without Masters 3) have you or do you know people who went through similar transition and how did they achieve it 4) am I right to believe that ML/AI expertise is going to be incredibly important going forward and it warrants all this effort?