They do need both but it seems like they have enough engineering talent to keep improving. Time will tell now that Ilya is out but I expect they have enough cultural cache to attract excellent engineers even if they aren’t as famous as Ilya and Karpathy.
They have a strong focus on making the existing models fast and cheap without sacrificing capability which is music to the ears of those looking to build with them.
I love the way you used "cultural cache" here Lol. In any case I do hope whatever Ilya is building is some sort of AI competition to stop this OpenAI monopoly.
Things have been moving fast because we had a bunch of top notch scientists in companies paired with top notch salesmen/hype machines. But you need both in combination.
Hypemen make promises that can't be kept, but get absurd amounts of funding for doing so. Scientists fill in as many of the gaps as possible, but also get crazy resources due to the aforementioned funding. Obviously this train can't go forever, but I think you might understand that one of these groups is a bit more important than the other while one of these groups is more of a catalyst (makes things happen faster) for the other.
I'm not as in tune as some people here so: don't they need both? With the rate at which things are moving, how can it be otherwise?