The AI research job market
From the other side of the table, the machine learning candidate pool is also a clown show right now.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.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.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.