For me it is hard to invest too much time into being in first crowd.

This space is moving too fast for me and I have current job to do that is paying my bills.

I can invest time to watch/follow people from the first crowd.

But no one is going to give you a medal and it is not a „better crowd”.

I might need to pay for this expertise some day, but I guess it will be OpenAI or Anthropic that takes my money just like so far all the advances were introduced to frontier models or their own tooling.