There are plenty of people I know from FAANG, now at OpenAI, where they do product design, operation, and DevOps at scale —all complicated, valuable, and worthwhile endeavors in their own right— that don’t need to get in the way of research. They are just the kind of talent that can operate a business with 90% margins to pay for that research.

Could there be requests or internal projects that are less exciting for some people? Sure, but it’s not very hard to set up Chinese Walls, priorities, etc. Every one of those people had to deal with similar concerns at previous companies and would know how to apply the right principles.