Yes, I had the same impression. I'm sympathetic to the author's perspective but I can't muster even the minimal optimism they've shown here. The "process engineers" as described would themselves quickly be replaced by an automated system. The "statistical engineers", I think, would never be able to keep up with the rate of change of the AI models, which would likely have different statistical behavior and biases in each language/context/etc with each update, and so it's unlikely anyone would pay them to develop that required deep expertise in the first place. More likely, that work would be done at an AI foundation model company -- but it would be done just once, and then incorporated into the training process.