Also bunch of past workplaces who've adopted AI in various ways who reach out once they find out what my current focus lies, but that's harder for others to replicate unless you've already had a career as a developer.

I don't think the "incredibly small minority of companies in the world do any real training or optimisation" part is necessarily as true, as some parts of the work I do get is about helping them optimize training and infrastructure around training. Mind you, none of this is for building LLMs from scratch, it's 99% fine-tuning existing checkpoints.

I'd also agree with "paulg is in somewhat of a bubble" regardless of this, which is worth remembering whenever you read his content. Same goes for any person living in SF, and dare I say the US. But also, YMMV, I live and work in Europe, probably why I have this perspective.