This is like saying you understand the basic principles of internal combustion engines.
Sure, that gets you some level of understanding, but in no way prepares you to be even a mechanic, far less an engineer, let alone a researcher/engine innovator.
Sure, that gets you some level of understanding, but in no way prepares you to be even a mechanic, far less an engineer, let alone a researcher/engine innovator.
You are right in that the emergent abilities come from humongous amounts of training data and compute which only a handful of companies (and the people working in them) deal with today. I'm sure there's a lot of secret gotchas which only arise at a certain scale so one cannot self-study for them. Companies also guard these wherever possible because of economic incentives. But that applies to most other engineering disciplines. You can take a course in civil engineering and have enough knowledge to reason about why a skyscraper will not fall apart in the wind; doesn't mean you have the ability to build one.