Well, they’re also probably not scaling up in the same way as any of the commercial AI offerings, let alone the frontier labs. Faculty at Stanford probably have some decent hardware to play with, but they do not have data centers. I don’t doubt that they know their way around CUDA/PTX, but it’s not clear how relevant their message is given that their research code is very likely not being deployed in production, or at scale.

Disagree. The abstractions they are talking about aren't like, the y-combinator. They're talking about boring software engineering abstractions.