Communication breakdown

Today I have to evaluate claims to function in my real life as an agent, claims involving machine learning which has probability and statistics as a prerequisite. I am pretty sure I am more mathematically educated but perhaps not inclined than most people, and I don’t know how to go about in life evaluating such claims. I have no feelings of really understanding deep neural networks, let alone when you stack them together in a mess of architecture and then enormous training scale and attention heads and mixture of experts, layer upon layer of complexity. I have a degree in computer science and I have tried to learn a lot of mathematics. People are so insecure about their knowledge, of course I am too, but it seems like there is no way people know what is going on, in general. Are people that much smarter than I thought?