AI needs to be instructed to do a thing. To use the "steam engine designing another steam engine" analogy, why do the big labs give the highest pay of all to their prized researchers? Why do they take steps to prevent poaching? Surely a non-expert could prompt a model "find a superparameter combo that makes an amazing model" and the next gen model would emerge! The AI should be able to design a better AI on its own!

Why do the labs have thousands of employees? Lets think about this...

Who's designing the evals needed to validate the model quality, who's deciding what goes in the system prompt? Who's negotiating to buy training data from hundreds or even thousands of data vendors? Who's responding when the Internet goes apeshit over some prompt tweak that makes models over-verbose? Who's out there listening to users and feeding what they say back into the product pipeline?

Computers????

However automated things get, that quickly becomes the new baseline. Customer expectations are always going up.

And as soon as humans figure out how to automate any of the things listed above - it becomes part of the new baseline too. It's always advancing. To beat the baseline and be competitive, you need humans. No matter what. No matter how automatic the automated things get. Always and forever. Because you need someone to drive, to find the next automatable thing and automate it - and to prioritize where to search for automatable things.