AI Engineers are just software engineers who use specific tools. If we want to use a fancy title then that's fine, I guess. But let's not pretend that a typical dev can't easily learn vector DBs, data pre-processing, fine tuning, etc.
None of these things require specialized knowledge in the way that say being an AI researcher would.
You could say the same about things like SREs or Devops. In fact, many of them transitioned from regular "software engineer" to these roles simply by learning closely related skills.
That won't stop the industry from inventing new, useful titles.
None of these things require specialized knowledge in the way that say being an AI researcher would.