🔥 CONTROVERSIAL TAKE: Data Scientists are becoming extinct. GenAI killed them.

🔥 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 made great prototypes but poor production code  • Engineering teams routinely rebuilt notebook prototypes from the ground up to hit production

Then GenAI changed everything.

Now? A software engineer with prompt engineering skills can deploy AI solutions in days, not months. For many knowledge tasks, RAG on a foundation model now beats building a custom model from scratch. APIs cut the integration work to a fraction of what building and serving a custom model required.

💡 The harsh truth: We went from “lots of science, few AI products shipping” 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

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