In some more mature fields of engineering most of the practitioners are maintainers. Think of chemical engineering, each of the existing chemical plants are ru

In some more mature fields of engineering most of the practitioners are maintainers. Think of chemical engineering, each of the existing chemical plants are run by a team of engineers. Their job role is akin to “maintenance”, but they are still viewed as essential. They probably bring in more profit than those few who build/design new plants. With the trend now towards extremely expensive compute systems, like large language models, will we also see the trend in ML where most of the engineers are working on “maintenance” rather than designing/building new from scratch?