"OpenAI rejected me so the entire industry is going to collapse" is certainly a take. They are still probably one of the less arrogant engineers in silicon valley.
The take is that small incremental improvements on the hardware-software at that scale imply massive returns yet there isn't much work for that use case.
It isn't really. The assumption that these companies aren't hiring any infrastructure engineers is absurd. They all have massive in-house teams doing GPU optimization and everything else that the author brings up. They just don't need an external consultant for it.
He didn't say they aren't hiring _any_ but that they are hiring few and that he finds it strange that despite his multi-decades record of squeezing performance on the gpu-software stack he isn't getting much collaboration proposals.
There are people who are experts in a generalist sense. When a new field opens up, they quickly snatch up the opportunity and make immense progress and name for themselves in the evolving field. So in this case the first author is the mouse who ate the cheese and died.
Sorry, I should have said he died in the process of getting the cheese while the second mouse got the cheese.
The phrase "the second mouse gets the cheese" means that it can be beneficial to let others take the initial risk, as the first to act might trigger a negative outcome, leaving the opportunity for the second person to succeed without the same danger. I
