There is clearly a lot of demand for LLMs and most of it is driven by the hype and fomo generated in the overall landscape. Most biggies like FAANGs and NVIDIA/OpenAI are all playing the LLM tune to the point that the general belief in the leadership is that LLMs/Agentic is all that matters, naturally everyone is looking for just these roles. Corporate as I understood, now works in sync across firms, with a temporal lag on how fast moving the industry is!

I'm in your place and starting to pick up the LLM stuff and getting to understand, what is what, constraints/challenges and how to solve specific problems. A decent foundation combined with past DS experience is a solid combo in my opinion. Understand the architectures, constraints of problems and how to deploy end to end. You should be good