AskBeehaw

I work in AI/ML, and it's such a hilariously broad and meaningless field I don't even do remotely the same thing as my coworker in the same team hired on the same day. They work in agentic llm swarm research I work in CV/RL. Here's three papers I had to read recently, and not fully understand but extract usable insight from (why did they do what they did and can I use that for myself)

Upsample anything

Dinov3

~~LTGNN line transformer graph neural networks for robust line feature matching~~ just kidding this one isn't on arxiv

It takes me a couple hours to deeply read a paper, I'm not like, getting 100% from it till like the 4th read through and a couple pages of notes, or reading a couple background papers (such as the JBU paper for UpAnything). Try reading one or two and if it seems interesting then maybe that's an area in AI ML that might be interesting to you.

Remember the people doing the most math are the people doing ai ML academically in a masters or PhD, us commercial users tend to do less math and more "this new model came out can we apply it to our problem"

Are you in CS now? How did you do in the algorithms class. Treat that class as the deciding factor of how much you will like it.

Asking how the job will be seems like the wrong question to me, when you're trying to answer what the studies will be. I would check with your uni instead.

Studies could be focused on maths or not. Jobs can be focused on maths if you're developing models and ml in depth, but is likely unnecessary if you're just training and assessing and embedding models, outside of maybe statistics, depending on use and needs.

LLM is a hot topic, but I suspect it did not overturn general ml.

I'm not in the field specifically, but we explore and discuss it at work, other team trained a model, and we use coding tools.

I would not enter AI/ML for one simple reason: it is oversaturated. Everyone and their brother is in tgis field, and even those outside of it still study it and us it. Unfortunately the way to stand out within AI/ML field is to have a very good mathematics/statistics foundation and really understand the theory behind it. You would be better served by getting skills in another field that AI/ML relies on or where AI/ML can be applier.

BTW, you should also state what you plan on doing with your degree. There is no point in getting a degree if there isn't a concrete benefit to doing so.