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Does it really?
When you build a DB do you really spend a lot of time thinking about set theory? How about 4th normal form? Or do you just do it?
Right now the thing that keeps those with an engineering mindset out side of the playground is COST. Get a 96gb GPU below 1000 bucks and they become toys, below 500 and a kid can get into playing with one (if that seems insane, it's the cost of a PS5).
You know what a 96gb GPU does... it opens up the idea of shoving small models into games. No more "I took an arrow to the knee" meme's because you could fill a world with characters in a story. It means running models at home makes sense.
The people working at removing "training" as a distinct step and making that an "ongoing" process (without it being lossy) are going to have a massive impact on the industry (more so in smaller models, we might get REAL agents). I would be willing to bet that it's an engineer that solves the issue and not someone with a math or ML background.
There are tons of ways the landscape will change and open up. In a few years that top 100 maybe one or two will be a a Dennis Ritchie or Michael Stonebraker.
Are you talking about building a db (eg sqlite) or designing a database schema? 4NF seems only relevant to the latter. I'd certainly hope that the developers of sqlite consider set theory in designing their database implementation.
Designing a schema is the application. Still valuable, but not exactly a the frontier of database research and development, which was exactly my point.
I wouldn't want to say it is easy, but this doesn't seem to be the work of geniuses as much as the work of people who work at large companies with lots of hardware.
And it is actually the same matrix multiplication people might learn at high school. The standard definition of matrix multiplication is generally accepted.
[0] We'd expect the figuring-things-out process to be faster for more cluey people, so the people who actually pick all this stuff up first probably are geniuses. But a more normal engineer with the hardware access would still figure it out independently sooner or later. It is just too neatly on the beaten path where we'd expect to be finding optimisations.
An average high school student doing physics today could derive Newton's laws. That doesn't mean that that student put in the same situation as Newton, would have been capable of discovering newton's laws.
We're essentially watching a bunch of investor-backed alchemists here.