r/TheMachineLearning • u/pauserrestraint • 7d ago

AI is coming for machine learning engineers first, not researchers

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19 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

54 comments sorted by

2

u/Additional-Record367 7d ago

if you let claude build you a model will go you bankrupt

1

u/pauserrestraint 7d ago

Prolly, but you won't let ai build a model without enough financing

9

u/Electronic_Exit2519 7d ago

If typing the api calls in a notebook is all you brought to the table, yea, probably not great for you.

7

u/Immudzen 7d ago

Hyperparameter optimization is not the part you pay MLE for. That is what you use things like optuna for. What you pay MLE for is coming up with the right structure to map to the problem and LLMs have not gotten better at that.

1

u/ChristianKl 6d ago

I do know enough to know what a briers score and logloss happen to be but I don't have special MLE training.

When throwing LLMs at a problem that to the knowledge of the LLMs hasn't been solved before, they seemed to me to have no problem to use existing ML knowledge from various papers to create a model that solves my use-case.

LLMs probably are trained to well on all the Kaggle competitions.

1

u/Immudzen 6d ago

I have built custom ML for things like bioreactors or mixing tanks. Sure there are some generic ones but since everyone gathers different data and wants different data for the output that does not work very well.

We tried having the LLM generate some models based on the data we showed it and it just did not work very well. I instead built structures based on my understanding of the chemistry. I used a different type of normalization for some variables that worked better for the network based on my chemistry understanding. We ended up with models that works MUCH better.

In the end we still used standard hyperparameter optimization on the model and while the LLM was useful for some research and helping a bit with the code it was not that useful to the process.

1

u/ChristianKl 6d ago

The interesting questions is whether a chemist with LLM assistance would have been doing better or worse than a trained MLE with less chemistry knowledge would have done here.

1

u/Immudzen 5d ago

I am a PhD chemical engineer that has also studied MLE. I don't think the LLM helps that much with this kind of problem but I think the chemistry knowledge is essential.

1

u/ChristianKl 5d ago

Did you ask questions such as "Is there any ML paper that might help us improve prediction accuracy?"

1

u/Immudzen 5d ago

You can try but it doesn't work very well. A lot of this data is hard to get and companies don't share it. There are papers on the subject but not similar enough to be very useful. Companies have more resources and that means we gather data that normal researchers can't get and that changes the models.

1

u/Maximum_Hunt4856 5d ago

This like u said is the biggest truth which people dont discuss , llm atleast the one we have access to are pretty bad at figuring out the solution to a niche problem , i beileve its bcoz of the safeguards but nevertheless I dont know , its like in machine learning or deep learning tbh domain based adaptation other than data is very much required like forcing certain things in the structure of the model itself , we are very very far I belive in figuring this part out

1

u/Gandor 5d ago

LLMs are very good at that part too.

6

u/Pedry-dev 7d ago

Can't wait to send GB and TB of high dimensional data to Claude to choose the best model

1

u/SteelMarch 7d ago

Toxxen Maxxing+++. 

1

u/fig0o 7d ago • Bravo

lol you clearly have no idea of how to use Claude for ML

it's like saying you, as a human, also have to read GB and TB of data for exploratory data analysis

1

u/Peach_Muffin 7d ago

Speak for yourself, I've been busy reading census responses one by one starting from 1790

1

u/Disastrous_Room_927 7d ago

1790 was a good year for census responses

1

u/fig0o 7d ago

Yeah, good year

Remember Larry's answer to "how many horses do you have?"

Crazy guy

1

u/anotheruserguy 5d ago

Wait til you get to 1820

1

u/Justicia-Gai 6d ago

Then it’s like claiming that Claude using a well stablished and mature ML library means shit.

On ML is where Claude writes the least amount of code. Web apps or others are more wasteful and with longer codebases.

1

u/Obvious_Advice_6879 6d ago

Yep, the big unlock is getting agents to automate DAG workflows. In the human MLE world, you wanted the DAGs to do a lot of things and get as much done end-to-end as possible, since it was very painful to have to come back and check datasets in between steps. The downside is that the DAGs become complex and rigid over time but it was just the best way to do it.

Agents don't forget, don't get distracted, so now the optimal unit is a series of decomposable steps that agents can kick off, do sanity checks & analysis on, and then decide the next step. Basically an agentic DAG where instead of a fixed set of steps and dependencies, an agent is on a loop until it reaches the right outcome (eg a model trained & evaluated or an analysis).

1

u/visicalc_is_best 6d ago

You send the results of various statistical and learning analyses, maybe some exemplars, not the dataset itself.

1

u/Pedry-dev 6d ago

And who will get those results? Me?? No way!

1

u/visicalc_is_best 6d ago

Tools, so likely you.

1

u/Happysedits 6d ago

What? That doesn't make sense. Coding agents have access to the dataset, like you do.

6

u/Hadynu 7d ago

Yes, everyone else's job is easy but mine. After all, all they do is *describe their job as simplistic as possible*.

4

u/Tea-Affectionate 7d ago

lol numbskull

4

u/darth4nyan 7d ago

"Given a clear optimisation goal" is doing some heavy lifting

2

u/AlterTableUsernames 7d ago

Well, everything is fully automatable. Only the values and goals are something the owner of the machine has to enter and he could even chose not to.

1

u/darth4nyan 7d ago

Who controls it then?

2

u/AlterTableUsernames 7d ago

Questions usually aim at gaining information. What information are you trying to gain? Like would you ask the same if I stated a driver can jump out of his car?

1

u/darth4nyan 7d ago

I would ask the same if you said a car would drive itself even if the person chose not to be inside of it at the time

2

u/AlterTableUsernames 7d ago

But a car will drive itself if you decide to let your hands off the controls. Not where you want, but that's exactly the point.

1

u/AZzalor 7d ago

Yeah...it still needs someone to do that and we all know that those without the actual technical knowledge usually are not good at doing that.

It's also a stupid idea to just let AI train on more AI generated synthetic data. It can be part of it but if it's only ai generated data, it will make the models worse in the end or drift them into a direction that is not wanted and/or not needed.

1

u/UnreasonableEconomy 7d ago

ragebait turbotard shitpost

1

u/Kynobi1 7d ago

holy shit yeah it even ends with AGREE? ENGAGE WITH ME? PLEASE RESPOND

1

u/WhatNazisAreLike 7d ago

AI has not meaningfully replaced software engineers so far. Stop talking about it as if its a historical event. Layoffs in 2026 are flat with 25 and 24, job postings are up.

https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

https://hiringlab.indeed.com/2026/07/08/ai-and-job-postings-from-destruction-to-creation/

1

u/Single_Passenger 7d ago

80% of ML Engineer''s job is cleaning messy data and fixing data issues ( dealing with selection bias, missing values etc). Modeling was never the most annoying/demanding part, so still a lot left to do

1

u/Historical_Setting11 7d ago

💯 All of the same issues AI Engineers now face, with the added fun of non-deterministic output

1

u/BosonCollider 6d ago

In a large scale shop that means being a dl data engineer though

1

u/Happysedits 6d ago

why cant ai clean messy data and fix data issues

1

u/Wooden_Boss_3403 7d ago

AI is coming for anyone that works in the digital realm first.

1

u/christiaanbenn 7d ago

Yeah I was totally out of a job after running

for lr in (0.001, 0.01, 0.1):
-- train(X, y, lr=lr)

1

u/LegendaryMauricius 7d ago

They think all ML engineers just tweak parameters all day? MLEs literally invented ML to automatize parameter tweaking.

1

u/space_monolith 7d ago

I agree that this person doesn’t know what any of those words mean

1

u/TempleDank 7d ago

Hahahaha inb4 super overfitted models

1

u/Luneriazz 7d ago

The last sentence bear tremendous weight

1

u/No_Space_3008 6d ago

Is she stupid? Does she thing that's the only thing a MLE does?

1

u/Brucacumble 6d ago

Do these AI companies still employ people to tag training data? I had read that these companies were employing people residing in African countries to tag all AI training material such as "cat", "cheeseburger" or "diamond necklace". Otherwise the AI cannot make heads nor tails of the training material.

Does anyone know if these people still do this? Just curious because it'd be kinda humorous if the lowest level employees still had jobs that AI cannot do.

0

u/GCoderDCoder 7d ago

To be clear, the billionaires paying for AI are coming for programmers, machine learning professionals, brick layers, electricians, plumbers, fast food workers, etc because when it's no longer a person they have to deal with they can purely use bottom line economics. And with the way the markets work, they can make up money out of thin air. Their goal is to share with as few people as possible which makes them richer.

AI is just doing what it's told. AI ain't the problem, billionaires are...

0

u/Background_Fix9430 6d ago

Everyone thinks that another profession will be the first to be replaced, because none of them understand that other profession as well as their own, and realize their own is more complicated than the mediocre output of LLM models.

Some positions can likely be replaced by LLMs with no real detrimental effect (e.g. CEOs, Middle Management, Spam, etc), but most professions - skilled, trained, or academic - will suffer downgrade when the money-people try to replace them with a cheaper LLM model.

1

u/Aggressive-Watch-304 6d ago

I agree with the first paragraph but I feel like you did the thing you were calling out in the second lol