AI is most certainly not a new field. NN are decades old, it's only modern LLM transformer tech that is new. Perhaps look at a primer on NN feed forward, RNN a

AI is most certainly not a new field. NN are decades old, it's only modern LLM transformer tech that is new. Perhaps look at a primer on NN feed forward, RNN and transformer evolution. There's also GOFAI, genetic algorithms, pattern matching algorithms (image recognition is a subset of NN), rules based algorithms (e.g. Bayesian) and others. As a tech lead dev, I hire ML specialists and most can't even tell me what GPT stands for in ChatGPT, but some actually have a the full background I mention above, and there's very few of these, even less of those understand the mathematics, but just how to use Langchain or AWS services. So it's true there is a skills shortage, but it's heavily polluted by people jumping on the AI bandwagon to try and get a lucrative/high paying job, and this is probably what you are seeing.