I just don't think he realizes how saturated it got over the years. Or maybe he knows at a conscious level, but not subconsciously.

In 2000 (his era), it would have been really smart to study the source of Linux or Apache. Would have paid dividends over decades. Cuz that knowledge was so rare. The number of people hacking on LLMs now dwarfs the number of people hacking on web servers 30 years ago, by several orders of magnitude.

And if you turn back the clock even more, I mean just even having access to a computer, let alone owning one, would have put you at a massive advantage.

I don't know what to call it. The pioneers should be respected obviously, but at the same time you need to understand that for them, the game wasn't nearly as played out as it is now.

I just don't think you can afford to be dicking around with LLMs like you could afford to dick around with random Linux distros 20 years ago. Too many people willing to do it for free these days.

You don't wanna end up being the 2030 equivalent of a certain SNES emulator developer, or maintainer of a package manager for jailbroken iPhones, I mean the list goes on and on. Being a hacker doesn't automatically give you a path to being rich, or even making a decent living. It hasn't been that way for a while.