Having a car might be critical and acquiring a car might be expensive, but there are a lot of them and they are ultimately replaceable. If your is lost and you still have cash, you can generally go find a new one the same day and get borrow a ride from someone if you really need to.

That's not necessarily true for (say) the rare high-end graphics board you use for running local inferences. It's also expensive -- even less expensive than the car -- but replacing it can be a bigger deal and cause a complete interruption.

There are countless experienced late-career generalists who can keep projects moving by contributing to critical, smart support. I'm one of them. We're extremely valuable indeed.

But there really are far fewer people who were ahead of the curve and years-deep into the AI research central to OpenAI's entire existence. Those people are beyond critical, they're essential.

That doesn't make them better people, or smarter people, or in any other way elite. It just means that in the context of OpenAI those people are much harder to come by and can be much more disruptive when lost.

Apologies, I'm afraid I wasn't very awake reading your comment. You're right, my issue is more about the dismissive attitude that I often see: for some reason I mistook you as someone having that attitude as well.