Yes. It's like looking at the (Apollo) moon rocket launch and then suggesting teenagers should learn to build rockets in their garages for the coming space age.
It is viable as a toy project, but there are vanishingly few career opportunities.
Building an LLM covers a lot of CS fundamentals and forces you to do lots of research in order to implement one, especially on more modest hardware.
It's like looking at the early internet and then suggesting teenagers should write browsers as their projects instead of webpages.