- "Real AI Scientist/Applied Scientist/Researcher" aka you do actual training/fine tuning of bleeding edge models. Very hot right now but competition is incredibly intense. Probably you need a PhD or some serious experience to compete. Get ready to do a bunch of independent learning if you're serious about this.
- "Fake AI Scientist/Applied Scientist/Researcher" - You work in a big corporation or maybe a confused startup who wants to staff out some internal AI teams but doesn't really have true expertise in the area. Maybe if you really knock it out of the park something you build will provide real customer value...one day.
- "Real AI-ML Engineer" Scientist work under a different name, or deployment/infra for custom models. More approachable than Real Scientist work but probably more focused on engineering chops, C++, CUDA, etc. Similar to Real Scientist in that you need to have some actual legit skills.
- "Fake AI-ML Engineer" Calling the OpenAI API and massaging the output into something that is possibly valuable but more likely is just a "AI Feature" on top of an existing application that provides real customer value.
- "Non-AI ML Engineer" You work with traditional ML like xgboost, probably in the financial world, and don't really interact with any of this stuff, unless your boss asks you to create a new AI Feature. You can now put this on your resume and hope to get a Fake AI-ML Engineer job, if you want to.
- "Real Data Science" this role is trending toward inhabiting more of a BI/Analytics space. IMO in Big Tech they are getting more serious about the stats/probability background here. In some ways I think this would be more difficult to upskill on than Deep Learning math, if you're starting without a math background.
- "Fake Data Science" Kind of a dying role, this is like "I just learned how to do pandas and scikit learn and I'm creating linear regressions for boomers". Honestly still some alpha here if you are a product-focused person in the right org. But maybe the title here should be more like Data Analyst++
Hope this helps. Me myself I'm a Non-AI ML Engineer who is pretty screwed, because if you search ML Engineer now everyone wants you to know PyTorch.