So, I'm guessing that the people with the most regrets about joining the California gold rush were the ones who decided to move there after 1850. It might be wo

So, I'm guessing that the people with the most regrets about joining the California gold rush were the ones who decided to move there after 1850. It might be worth thinking about whether this is because you find machine learning interesting on a personal level, or whether you're just trying to be where the excitement is. If the AI hype has already started to cool off by the time you graduate, are you going to feel regret about the real & opportunity costs of going back to school, or would you still see it as personally rewarding and feel motivated to persevere in building a machine learning career in a slower job market? That said, if you want to get into machine learning, I've been seeing that increasingly many entry-level machine learning jobs now require a master's degree of some sort. Be aware, though, that these jobs may not be glamorous. I've go a master's degree myself, and usually see all the really exciting work get handed to colleagues with PhDs. I still find it to be a rewarding career, but that's possibly because I enjoy the work itself, and am not particularly worried about the glamor. It may also be worth pointing out, while all of my colleagues do have at least a master's degree, none of them have one in machine learning specifically. Typically it's one in some other hard or social science. Basically anything that builds a strong foundation in statistics, linear algebra, and research & experimental methodology. The actual machine learning part of the job is kind of the easy part, and mostly belongs in the top row of that "what people think I do / what I really do" meme. I did have two former colleagues who started out as software engineers and then got a master's in machine learning / data science / whatever in order to pivot to AI/ML. Both of them really struggled to settle into the work, and ended up reverting back to just being software engineers, only now with a lot more student debt.