I built from scratch a sparse text embedding model trained on a 13T token corpus. Not the same as an LLM because there’s no transformer in the mix, but still I learned a shit load of things in order to solve all sorts of problems that emerge when you try to access big datasets and daily update tables with billions of rows. But if it wasn’t for a specific use case that I tried to solve I don’t think that whatever knowledge I gained could be utilized in the market. Sparse models are a very small niche and most people I’ve come across with similar knowledge are in academic circles, not business related ones. So even if LLMs are all the rage these days I doubt the demand for people who know how to build them is that high. Someone who knows how to setup an open weight model and expose an API might be more valuable to a company these days.