If you don't see the evidence of different individuals having very different productivity in every field, including software, (measured in $/hr like every economist does btw) that's a you problem.

Of course different scientists with different backgrounds, professionalism, communication and leadership skills are going to have magnitude of orders different outputs and impacts in AI companies.

If you put me and Carmack in a game development team you can rest assured that he's going to have a 50/100x impact over me, not sure why would I even question it.

Not only his output will be vastly superior than mine, but his design choices, leadership and experience will save and compound infinite amounts of money and time. That's beyond obvious.