Everyone says they want to do training, because it's sexy and an easy way to justify raising mad funding rounds. Some manage, most don't.

I don't know where you are located, but in EU, in China, and yes even in Silicon Valley, the vast majority of companies do not do any real AI engineering. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not a smart path for most purposes. You can do amazing things without training, and if you try to train, you cannot get anything amazing unless you burn millions.

Very few people can afford to play the long game and cross that dessert. And, sure, you will not get far without good engineering, but good engineering is definitely not sufficient and is not the primary bottleneck.

It took a long time to cross that desert, and no sane company would want to get stuck in a desert, unless it's specifically an R+D "desert crossing" company.