(I gave the talk.) > I've likely lost any shot I had at contributing in areas that will advance the state of the art since I graduated college 20 years ago. F

(I gave the talk.) > I've likely lost any shot I had at contributing in areas that will advance the state of the art since I graduated college 20 years ago. For a bit of optimism: if you are a good software engineer, you can become a contributor in a modern AI research lab like OpenAI. We hire software engineers to do pure software engineering, and can also train them to do the machine learning themselves (cf https://blog.openai.com/spinning-up-in-deep-rl/ https://blog.openai.com/spinning-up-in-deep-rl/ or our Fellows and Scholars programs). As one concrete example, though not the norm, our Dota team has no machine learning PhDs (though about half had prior modern ML experience)!