I currently work as an ML engineer and have interviewed on both sides for some well known companies.
The absolute demand in number of people is small compared to popularity. It would not surprise me at all if many computer science master's programs had a majority of the students studying machine learning. I remember in undergrad we had to ration computer science classes due to too much demand from students. I think school had 3x majors over a couple year time period in CS.
The number of needed ML engineers is much smaller than total software engineers. When a lot of students decide ML is coolest we have imbalanced CS pool with too many wanting to do ML. Especially when for ML to work you normally need good data engineering, backend engineer, infra, and the actual ML is only a small subset of the service using ML.
At the same time supply of experienced ml engineers is still low due to recent growth of the field. Hiring 5+ years of professional experience ML engineers is more challenging. The main place were supply is excessive is for new graduates.
The absolute demand in number of people is small compared to popularity. It would not surprise me at all if many computer science master's programs had a majority of the students studying machine learning. I remember in undergrad we had to ration computer science classes due to too much demand from students. I think school had 3x majors over a couple year time period in CS.
The number of needed ML engineers is much smaller than total software engineers. When a lot of students decide ML is coolest we have imbalanced CS pool with too many wanting to do ML. Especially when for ML to work you normally need good data engineering, backend engineer, infra, and the actual ML is only a small subset of the service using ML.
At the same time supply of experienced ml engineers is still low due to recent growth of the field. Hiring 5+ years of professional experience ML engineers is more challenging. The main place were supply is excessive is for new graduates.