The first path lets you become a quantitative problem solver, which is widely employable. The second path leads to being very good at specific deep learning tas

The first path lets you become a quantitative problem solver, which is widely employable. The second path leads to being very good at specific deep learning tasks that I don't think will be in large demand in 5 years IMO, at least outside the largest tech companies with all the data. Other companies will fulfill their business needs with fewer ML-specialists, AutoML and pretrained models.