Choosing between LLM and agentic/physical AI research

The author is deciding between two research paths: LLM-centered work (alignment, interpretability, inference/optimization) which currently has more jobs and transferable skills, and agentic/physical AI (agents, multimodal, VLAs, robotics) which has fewer roles but growing investment and higher entry barriers. They ask about trajectories over 4–6 years and how transferable skills between the fields are.

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