It sort of makes you wonder if we're looking at a future where something like 5 teams composed of 1000 of the top researchers each are going to build the premier ML systems, and those teams can then solve most generalized ML tasks.

Most other programmers wouldn't be able to contribute much value in a world that worked like this.

This perhaps mirrors how the chip market works, which similarly involves a limited number of researchers involved in advanced manufacturing techniques that are highly specialized and mostly a mystery to other people in the technology field.