Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home

It's like they counted up the number of people who know what a linear regression is, and called them all 'AI engineers'.

In fairness a regression is about the extent of a large number of "machine learning" efforts ever get to (often with good reason, actually).

It's worse than what you write, though. I've seen the "AI" and "machine learning engineer" labels applied to jobs where the developer is basically copy-and-pasting some sklearn snippet from an ipython notebook written by an actual ML/Data Science engineer into his "production" pipeline.