Since a young age, I've been interested in machine and deep learning. I’m currently in the second year of my Computer Science BSc (Toronto, Canada) and already have almost 2 years of experience in industry (computer vision + NLP) and over a year in academia doing AI research (both full time). Additionally, I have quite a few open-source projects (all DL-related) that have garnered over 1,000 stars in total, and some are very well-known in their respective niches. Lately though, I'm getting the impression that the field is over-saturated, with new research being published on a daily basis, and I identify as nothing but a cog in the machine as an AI developer. I understand that all domains are affected by this phenomenon to some degree, but in AI in particular, my work doesn’t feel personal at all, and to myself, I ironically seem like a robot that trains a vision transformer to do classification, fine-tunes an LLM for certain types of documents, makes architectural changes for a tiny improvement in performance, etc.

What are alternative branches in CS that you suggest I consider? I have two chief priorities:

* Creativity: I'm not seeking a typical software development job such as full-stack developer. Instead, I'm interested in opportunities that require creativity, almost like puzzle solving, and don’t become “routine” after a while. * Industry: My goal is to work in industry, not academia. This is not because I don’t enjoy research (in fact, I prefer it to applied work), but as reluctant as I am to admit it, salary does play a role in my decision making, and I’m aiming for six figures.

To give you a concrete example: I love work in logic, programming language research, theoretical computer science, and so on because they satisfy my first criterion, but it sadly appears that employment opportunities are mostly confined to academia?

I really appreciate your thoughts and feedback.