The roles where you do a little of both are the most fun! I used to do the algo work, now I work entirely on the infra side of things at one of the larger corps. We support some massive teams that have their own platform team between the AI devs and us, and also some smaller teams where the AI devs do it all themselves and just talk to us directly.

In all cases, where I am now and in my previous infra-only role, the AI teams were kinda stuck on our Linux shit for the reasons I described--specifically, you need to write stuff differently (or use an SDK that's tightly coupled to the underlying compute) for distributed training so there's no real point running it locally.

I personally REALLY miss the ability to develop and test locally with a real IDE, so I hope something changes--however, the trend is heading towards better remote development, not making stuff work on Mac.