I've started a company in this space about 2 years ago. We are doing fine. What we've learned so far is that a lot of these techniques are simply optimisations to tackle some deficiency in LLMs that is a problem "today". These are not going to be problems tomorrow because the technology will shift. As it happened many time in the span of the last 2 years.

So yah, cool, caching all of that... but give it a couple of months and a better technique will come out - or more capable models.

Many years ago when disc encryption on AWS was not an option, my team and I had to spend 3 months to come up with a way to encrypt the discs and do so well because at the time there was no standard way. It was very difficult as that required pushing encrypted images (as far as I remember). Soon after we started, AWS introduced standard disc encryption that you can turn on by clicking a button. We wasted 3 months for nothing. We should have waited!

What I've learned from this is that often times it is better to do absolutely nothing.

I think knowing when to do nothing is being able to evaluate if the problem the team is tackling is essential or tangential to the core focus of the project, and also whether the problem is something new or if it's been around for a while and there is still no standard way to solve it.