AI/ML is already moving to in a direction of Core software engineering (Backend), especially when we have these LLMs to do all AI stuff and you’re more concerned about how do they work in production at scale. little knowledge of ML would be sufficient to move to role of Machine Leadership Engineer.

I’m not sure about that, I think working with a foundational model (GPT4) might be like that but there’s room for more traditional ML engineering with Llama 2 or other tuneable models