You're completely full of shit if you think that ChemE is anywhere near as competitive as CS AI/ML applications. As someone who came top 150 USNCO and did very well in my chemistry classes that I took with ChemE majors, I can assure you that the quality of PhD students in CV/NLP in CS is much, much higher than ur average ChemE PhD students at the same school. My school sends people to HYPSM for chem/cheme PhD, but hardly anyone gets in for CS PhD in spite of our CS ranking being better. Stop acting like such a arrogant fuck, ur not the same tier as someone doing an ML PhD at those schools.

U 100% need top conference publications from well-known recommenders, but a very high GPA is also needed because there are plenty of people who have the whole package.