A little industry secret, every frontier lab has a tiny, tiny number of people who understand the architecture + training stack at a level almost nobody else does quite literally it can be as few as 1-6 people. Not just transformers on paper, but which changes actually survive trillion token training runs, how scaling behavior interacts with data mixtures, and all the tacit tricks that separate a good architecture from a frontier model, they can save a bad training bad and save the company millions and millions of dollars every training run. Every lab has its “Noam Shazeers.” When one of those people leaves, you’re losing years of accumulated, (largely undocumented) knowledge about how to make these systems actually scale and replacing that knowledge can materially set a lab back. That’s why they’re are paid 100M to 1B in stock options + salary.