[nbardy]

> And a large fraction of those who do have re-used existing open source solutions without digging a lot into them.

This is a good thing. Coming up with new ideas is for researchers. Turning them into a product is for entrepreneurs and engineers. One of the reasons I see so much promise in ai startups is because the research has matured to a point where anyone can take it off the shelf and apply it to their domain. Similar to the web, there was a few early companies that did great things with novel engineering, but most of the value generated was CRUD apps built on top of frameworks like Ruby on rails.