The AI research job market
From the other side of the table, the machine learning candidate pool is also a clown show right now.<p>I did some hiring for a very real machine learning (AI if you want to call it that) initiative that started even before the LLM explosion. The number of candidates applying with claimed ML/AI experience who haven’t done anything more than follow online tutorials is wild. This was at a company that had a good reputation among tech people and paid above average, so we got a lot of candidates hoping to talk their way into ML jobs after completing some basic courses online.<p>The weirdest trend was all of the people who had done large AI projects on things that didn’t need AI at all. We had people bragging about spending a year or more trying to get an AI model to do simple tasks that were easily solved deterministically with simple math, for example. There was a lot of AI-ification for the sake of using AI.<p>It feels similar to when everyone with a Raspberry Pi started claiming embedded expertise or when people who worked with analytics started branding themselves as Big Data experts.