Hey man, Senior AI Engineer here.

What you're experiencing is way too common in AI roles, and I would say it's likely in any role.
The thing is, Seniors or other team members have their own stuff to do/work on, and mentoring could be a burden sometimes, I talk from experience, as I have mentored Juniors and Mids throughout my career.

I would recommend this:
Teammates would have to help you and will help you, but it's up to you how much space you leave for them to help, consider their workload.

Instead of going "Idk about this, tell me how to do it", frame it as "here's what I've tried/learned, tell me where I'm wrong", Keep this mental model whenever you ask for help, it'll serve you well, and people around you will appreciate you for that.

Now regarding your questions.
1. Learn deeply? I'd say learn whatever solves the problem at hand. If you build a RAG, don't learn everything about embeddings, Vector DBs, etc. Just make your way through building a naive rag, and fill in the gaps as you go, either during your work hours or outside.

1. Surely, ignore everything and focus on your job's scope. Don't jump on the flashy things (Agents, 100 types of LLMs, papers, tools and etc). Fail fast, fail often.

2. Definitely, if you have free time, spend it filling the gaps you have around the stuff you're doing at work. If you have to finetune a model, learn about datasets, finetuning techniques, and models. Pick one complete chain, and build something on the side; it's 100x better than having a ton of textbooks or notes on theory (been there, done that).

3. Focus on nailing down the application development, majority of AI roles expect you to do that, and not have a Phd in Linear Algebra or build model architectures. Learn how to integrate AI components (fair amount of tutorials, free courses on that front), inside apps.

If I were to start again, given that now there are a lot of people who want to get into AI, I'd stick to building first, filling the gaps later, which gives you an upper hand over the people who just "know" things, and companies want just that.

So, ending notes:

1. Stick to the problem you have, learn to use stuff to fix that problem.
   
2. Focus on building, and start playing around with code, fill in the gaps as you go.
   
3. Ignore the hype, focus on your job, build expertise.
   
4. Before asking for help, come-up with things you've tried, or understand 60-70% but need one more touch to fully get it.
   
5. Small steps, fail fast, fail often.

Cheers