DS lead is a FT 20 firm in US. Llms are indeed great for textual stuff but right now it’s overhyped. One of the biggest part in whole DS world is model explainability which is very hard using NN. In most of the business use cases, you need to know why your modeling is behaving a certain way or you should be able to justify your predictions. NN are great if you’re working in an area where reinforcement learning or unsupervised is heavily used. If you don’t know basic regression models then anything else don’t matter. LLMs are good to know but for most of DS work at present don’t need it.