If the under the hood line engineers aren’t getting wild compensation for products they built generating wild compensation for the engineers/researchers working on the end product, yes that is a fair point.
If it’s these engineers not getting the recognition of Chief AI scientist and so on, that’s misguided I think. There is nothing worse than working under a technical SME who doesn’t know leadership, and also “product,” broadly defined.
I’ve worked on both sides of the issue and org leadership is a defined skill set the same way optimized code is. Unless the backend engineers display that leadership ability, their closeness to the internals of the technology doesn’t justify them running how the technology gets deployed.
It is the same as if you found a startup. During the ideation sessions with whatever VC buys into you, there is 5% discussion of tech, or better yet - checkbox the product mvp works. 95% who are you going to sell this to and have you spoken to them? Different skills.
When tech is a business, the tech knowledge starts to matter less, or is only a portion of the picture. The individuals that grasp that do well, SWEs who ignore this don’t IMO.