I don't think that's a fair assessment. I'm not anywhere near as high on LLMs as many, but Google and Meta's moonshot side projects and insane investments into

I don't think that's a fair assessment. I'm not anywhere near as high on LLMs as many, but Google and Meta's moonshot side projects and insane investments into infrastructure have given us Waymo, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, React, MapReduce, http2, the entire Go programming language, V8, all of Facebook's investments into improving PHP and OCaml. We can quibble over how valuable each of these things individually is, but it's not just toys. It's foundational tooling used all over the place that the larger community pretty just got for free. They've also been some of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel. To be fair, I don't know that we needed Google et al for this. We used to get this kind of thing from DARPA and university researchers, but Google and Facebook and friends made so much money from ads that they hired away all the best researchers so they no longer work at universities, at the same time government was hollowing out funding for basic research. We could get this thing from real public sources if we made the public investments, but I don't know that the political will or taxpayer willingness exists to do that now. We need to get it from somewhere.