Comment by vunderba

> does a commercial airline pilot need to know every single subsystem in order to do their job?

Not a great comparison. First off, nobody is suggesting that a self-purported "AI Engineer" has to understand EVERY SINGLE SUBSYSTEM, but they should still have a strong command of the internal workings of the modern foundational material (transformers, neural networks, latent space, etc.) to style themselves as such.

The better question is "does an aviation mechanic need to understand the internal systems of an airplane?" and the answer is a resounding yes.