Ive been banging my head against the wall for like six months now trying to pivot from standard web dev into AI and honestly its just exhausting. Every single job posting I look at in the Austin area or even for remote roles wants me to have a masters in statistics or be able to recite every single data cleaning algorithm from memory and its just making me want to give up on the whole thing. I just spent $1,200 on this AI Masterclass and half the curriculum is just pandas and numpy and cleaning messy csv files for hours. Like I get that data is important but I want to actually build stuff and work with LLMs or computer vision not spend my whole life fixing formatting errors in a spreadsheet.

I really thought AI was more about the architecture and the logic but it feels like Im just being trained to be a glorified data janitor and Im just so over it. Is there even a path for someone who wants to work in AI without being a hardcore data scientist? Do I actually need to be a math genius and a data wizard just to build cool apps or am I just looking at the wrong roles? I need to find a new gig by November before my current contract runs out and Im starting to panic that Im wasting my time on the wrong skills...