While this sounds plausible and has a lot of "prior" credibility coming from someone as central to deep learning as François Chollet, I'd love to see corroborating signal in actual job-posting data, from LinkedIn, Indeed, GlassDoor, etc. Backing up this kind of claim with data is especially important given the fact that the pandemic is disrupting all job sectors to varying degrees.

As you can imagine, searching Google for "linkedin job posting data" doesn't work so great. The closest supporting data I could find is this July report on the blog of a recruiting firm named Burtch Works [1]. They searched LinkedIn daily for data scientist job postings (so not specifically deep learning) and observed that the number of postings crashed between late March and early May to 40% of their March value, and have held steady up to mid-June, where the report data period ends.

There's also this Glassdoor Economic Research report [2], which seems to draw heavily from US Bureau of Labor Statistics data available in interactive charts [3]. The most relevant bit in there is that the "information" sector (which includes their definitions of "tech" and "media") has not yet started an upward recovery in job postings, as of July.

[1] https://www.burtchworks.com/2020/06/16/linkedin-data-scienti...

[2] https://www.glassdoor.com/research/july-2020-bls-jobs-report...

[3] https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/employment-l...