There are almost certainly more hackers pursuing intellectual challenges than there have ever been before. What has happened is that the entire rest of the world has arrived on the web, so the intellectuals don't stand out as much.

It used to be that more than half the people on the web were pursuing Ph.D-level projects in computer science. But that was because there were only twelve people on the web, and all of them were MIT students or BBN employees.

Yours is a very common complaint. You hear it all the time in the sciences: Where (people ask) are the contemporary physicists who would rank with Einstein or Fermi? The answer is that there are more people who understand quantum mechanics and general relativity today than there ever were before, and they have a much better understanding than Einstein or Fermi ever did. But they also aren't famous, because it's a lot more boring to be one of several thousand experts on general relativity than it is to be the very first one.

Similarly, I've heard it said that the all-time golden age of mathematics may be... today. There are a lot of mathematicians around. There's more funding than ever before in history.