I think it's vastly underrated how important org chart and team functionality is to building a good LLM. Over 18 months old, and still one of my favorite all time Interconnects posts. It's why we still often see orgs crumble and need to get rebuilt (e.g. Llama/xAI) and why I believe underdogs can still catch up. Having an effective org and team is worth multiple multiples in compute.
I also think there isn't that much secret sauce to building models. Yes, sure there are some tricks, but most of the gains come from consistent execution and using your compute wisely.