[D] Is it common for recent "LLM engineers" to not have a background in NLP?

The past few weeks I've attended a few Meetups and networking events where I met a lot of people claiming they "work with LLMs." I personally don't have that much experience with them and have done research in more "classic" NLP (ELMo and BERT were big announcements when I was doing research) and have now been in industry working mostly as an engineer.

I noticed very often that when I try to talk about connections between LLM research patterns or …

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