You can easily make a career in machine learning with a Master's degree, and a thesis that focuses on a ML problem. To work as a scientist in a research lab, y

You can easily make a career in machine learning with a Master's degree, and a thesis that focuses on a ML problem. To work as a scientist in a research lab, you do need a PhD, very few Master's candidates can make it there. But to work in startups and some large companies doing Machine Learning mostly is not that hard. I have worked in various companies as a "Research Engineer" and "Data Mining Engineer". I know someone who is a "Scientist" doing NLP in Yahoo Research and has only a Masters.