🔥 CONTROVERSIAL TAKE: Data Scientists are becoming extinct. GenAI killed them.
written by Stefan Christoph
🔥 CONTROVERSIAL TAKE: Data Scientists are becoming extinct. GenAI killed them.
Just 3 years ago, data scientists were the unicorns of tech. Companies fought over them, projects crawled at snail pace, and most ML models never saw production.
The reality was brutal: • Custom models took months to build • Jupyter notebooks couldn’t scale to production • Engineering teams had to rebuild everything from scratch to hit production
Then GenAI changed everything.
Now? A software engineer with prompt engineering skills can deploy AI solutions in days, not months. RAG systems outperform custom models. APIs make integration seamless.
đź’ˇ The harsh truth: We went from “no successful AI products with lots of science” to “loads of AI products with zero data scientists.”
But here’s my contrarian view…
Maybe data scientists aren’t dying. Maybe they’re finally FREE to do actual data science instead of wrestling with production pipelines and infrastructure headaches.
The role isn’t disappearing—it’s evolving.
What’s your take? Are data scientists becoming obsolete, or are they just getting back to their scientific roots while engineers handle the undifferentiated lifting?
Let’s discuss! 👇
#AWSomeVoices