What does an AI engineer actually do, and how is it different from a machine learning engineer? When people hear "AI engineer" they picture someone training massive models from scratch, writing research papers, doing heavy math — but that's a machine learning engineer, a researcher, or a data scientist. A different role with a different skill set.
An AI engineer builds applications on top of pre-trained foundation models like GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama. These models already exist and they're incredibly powerful, and your job is to turn them into real products: chatbots, search systems, AI agents, automation tools.
It's a hands-on, practical role — you're not publishing papers, you're shipping code.
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