That's part of the irony here I guess. In specialized fields, think computer vision, there were lots of teams whose innovative state of the art model was essentially just a function of the limitless compute they could throw at the problem. Now there are just people with even bigger sticks.

There are lots of scenarios where specialized models still are the only option for real time, power efficiency, and so on. And transformers and other tech behind LLMs can equally produce better specialized models. But no sympathy for those who confused compute with innovation.