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Shawn Wang (swyx) quote, Jun 30, 2023

Editor, Latent Space · Jun 30, 2023 · Essay, The Rise of the AI Engineer

There are 10x as many ML Engineer jobs as AI Engineer jobs on Indeed, but the higher growth rate of “AI” leads me to predict that this ratio will invert in 5 years.

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Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from Shawn Wang (swyx)

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Foundation Models are “ few shot learners ”, exhibiting in-context learning and even zero shot transfer capabilities that generalize beyond the original intent of model trainers. In other words, the people creating the models don’t fully know what they are capable of.Jun 30, 2023· Essay
I think software engineering will spawn a new subdiscipline, specializing in applications of AI and wielding the emerging stack effectively, just as “ site reliability engineer ”, “ devops engineer ”, “ data engineer ” and “ analytics engineer ” emerged.Jun 30, 2023· Essay
In the near future, nobody will recommend starting in AI Engineering by reading Attention is All You Need, just like you do not start driving by reading the schematics for the Ford Model T.Jun 30, 2023· Essay
We are observing a once in a generation “shift right” of applied AI, fueled by the emergent capabilities and open source/API availability of Foundation Models. A wide range of AI tasks that used to take 5 years and a research team to accomplish in 2013, now just require API docs and a spare afternoon in 2023.Jun 30, 2023· Essay

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My point is that, while there is a lot of debate over what future models will do, the current capabilities of existing models are barely being used, and are often not even well understood.Ethan MollickSep 18, 2026· Post
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About this quote
Said by
Shawn Wang (swyx), Editor, Latent Space
Where
The Rise of the AI Engineer
Topics
Work
Company
Latent Space
Source
latent.space/p/ai-engineer

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