Sometimes I look at stuff like this and sit in despair that I'm not learning anything that will let me work these kinds of problems while I work at a defense contractor maintaining 20+ year old code.
great resource on transformers, which underpin the openai breakthroughs (the "T" in GPT-3 stands for transformer): http://peterbloem.nl/blog/transformers
great reddit sub for tracking ml research and trends: https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning
great email newsletter on ml from andrew ng: https://www.deeplearning.ai/thebatch/
also, someone must maintain old code or things break. thanks for your contributions.
It's entirely possible to learn this stuff to near state-of-the-art level with a year or two of self-directed study outside of work. All the research is published open access, the software is open source, there are many high quality datasets available, hardware access is simple and free through Colab, and there are dozens of online courses and lectures at every level from beginner all the way to the cutting edge, again all free.
reddit.com/r/learnmachinelearning is also helpful for beginners.