I remember how I joined a startup after working for a traditional embedded shop and a colleague made (friendly) fun of me for not knowing how to use curl to post a JSON request. I learned a lot since then about backend, frontend and infrastructure despite still being an embedded developer. It seems likely that people all around the industry will be in a similar position when it comes to AI in the next years.
Most AI work will just be APIs provided by your cloud provider in less than 2 years. Understanding what's going on under the hood isn't going to be that common, maybe the AI equivalent of "use explain analyze, optimize indexes" will be what passes for (engineering, not scientist) AI expert around that time.
Most things provided by your cloud cloud provider are just slightly modified and pre-packaged versions of software you can run anyway. Postgres on EC2 is a perfectly viable alternative to whatever Amazon offers.
I remember how I joined a startup after working for a traditional embedded shop and a colleague made (friendly) fun of me for not knowing how to use curl to post a JSON request. I learned a lot since then about backend, frontend and infrastructure despite still being an embedded developer. It seems likely that people all around the industry will be in a similar position when it comes to AI in the next years.